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A Case for Linux in the Corporation
_UnderTow_ writes: "Saw this over at Anandtech. It's a pretty descriptive account of a reasonably large corporation (7000+ employees) transitioning their network infrastructure over to Red Hat Linux. Has details of the company's initial move to NT, and their eventual move to Linux as the cost of licensing gets out of control."
I didn't switch to linux because someone told me too, I switched because I needed an alternative OS. This is a good sign of things to come. Build a better OS, and people will come. Of course, it helps that Microsoft enforces license policies that soak consumers for every penny they're worth and even corporation who WANT to be legal are unsure of their licensing. The more Microsoft starts bullying people around, the more enticing free software becomes. If Microsoft ever stoops to the level of leased OS's there will be a whole lot more stories like this one.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
Before you flame me, read this whole article. This is a fairy tale of linux winning over microsoft. Not that it couldn't (or didn't) happen, it's just that the author presents it in such a format as to make it unbelievable. Did anyone else get that same impression?
There are thousand cases of Linux uses in corporates (large and smaller ones as well) on MandrakeBizCases.com. Worth a look.
What's missing are any verifiable facts. Until any are presented this article goes in the round file -- i.e.: somebody's pipe dream of the way Linux should help.
All of the major vendors list the company name with most case studies -- it is common practice. Who is the company? Is their third party verification of the reported shift?
It could happen -- it might have happened -- it is useless to use this article to sell management on the benefits of open source -- this has few if any real details.
Please, please present some factual and verifiable accounts that can be used in making OS decisions!
I don't care if you never implement a Linux/*BSD box, or if you think Linux is the biggest piece of crap to ever be installed on a computer. The simple fact that its an alternative to NT (and one that, as this article shows, can be done piecemeal) is good for the industry. It keeps MS honest. As an IT director you have one hell of a bargining chip at your disposal. You still may go with MS tech, but at least you can do it with some leverage on the licensing terms.
I don't know if the story is true or not, anyone know of a Washington State corporation with 7000 users that recently made the switch? I am from the area and am not aware of anything of that maginitude.
But, fairy tale nature aside, the article does show how big companies can get trapped in the licensing whirlpool. It used to be that no-on got fired for buying IBM. Now it is Microsoft that cannot do wrong. But even that is changing and companies that need to look hard at their bottom line should take note!
So I find this to be good ammunition for me as my fledgeling company starts to sell GNU/Linux-based business solutions. Of course my target market isn't companies with 7000 employees; more like 70 to 700. But I need all the bullet points I can make even with them.
So thanks for this posting!
Jack
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
...this would be a very interesting article.
As it stands, it's just annoying. How do we know how much is true, and how much is embellished (or even pure fantasy?)
I was about to pass it along to a colleague but decided not too. It's just TOO unverifiable.
I happen to be a Mac user with very little personal or professional involvement in either WIndows NT or LINUX.
While this analysis details very niceley what MS charged for service, the writer completely left out what RedHat charges, in this case or even generally.
Could someone with experience post some figures?
How long will RedHat be involved in providing service for a company they have switched to Linux. If all goes so smooth, why not hire an experienced sysadmin inside, why outsorcing?
One of the main reason I have heard time and time again for companies not switching to another lower TCO OS (MacOS, some open source Unix) is the cost of retraining. Here, MS, clearly made the cost of ownership HIGHER than the cost of retraining and a company noticed it. Now, after MS tries to move everyone to .NET and owning a WinTel computer requires annual fees, don't you think more companies will move away from Windows?
Burn Hollywood Burn
It seems to me that the commercial structure of MS's software makes it harder to admin.
I just wiped off my laptop, and as I write this I'm in the process of reinstalling windows and office on it. I installed W2K and Office 2000, and I'm in the process of patching everything. This is literally a 4 or 5 hour job. Now admittedly this is a slow machine (233Mhz, 228MB of ram), but that's still pretty crazy. And I have a DSL line -- this isn't
What if I had to do 700 of these things?
How does central application installation work under Windows? Is it even possible? How do they keep track of the licenses? Can you patch office once and have the changes propograte throughout the network?
Imagine a Linux network where applications are all stored on central file servers. You don't have to worry about whether or not someone has their KWord license. You can just let everyone read the NFS shares.
My point is that apart from the licensing fees, there's an overhead assocated with keeping track of who can run what. To protect their interests, MS has set things up in ways that make administration harder.
Things like centralized office suite administration haven't been high profile in linux up until now -- the focus has been on making usable office apps, things that don't totally suck in comparision to MS Office.
But I think there are some real opportunities to do things that MS will have more trouble pulling off, on account of the licensing.
apt-get is a beautiful thing. What would an enterprise level apt-get look like? What would allow you to install software or updates on 10,000 machines? Would would allow you to roll back a bad update on all of those changes? What would allow you to keep track of different software configurations for different job descriptions or hardware configurations? What would it take for admins to control what users can do with apt-get, so they don't break things?
What would it take for RedHat (or someone else) to feed updates into a large corporations office appication framework automatically?
It seems to me that Linux has a lot of groundwork laid for this sort of thing, and that it could be made to happen more easily than a lot of people think.
I think that everyone has a moment with apt-get. You've set up a new system, it doesn't have much on it, and someone sends you a zip file. So you say, "apt-get unzip", and 20 seconds later you can unzip the file.
In a windows environment, that works with zip (although it's definitely harder and slower). But what about Visio? If someone sends you a Visio document, you can't just download Visio.
We, on the other hand, can deploy a desktop that will download our diagram program on the fly when someone clicks on the file icon.
What does that do to admin costs? (Or: what does that do to our jobs?)
I believe that network aware package administration is going to be the thing that wins the enterprise for linux in the end.
The server may have been a little taxed, handling 7,000 e-mail accounts on a single pentium box may stress it a little, but other than e-mail taking a little longer to send the end users won't notice
I don't thing the box would've been taxed that badly... I once worked for a company that had 3500 email accounts on a single cpu, Pentium Pro 150Mhz machine with only 64MB ram and running FreeBSD and it did just fine. We typically had 1800-2000 concurrent users getting their mail via POP3 from that box at any given time during the business day. I can imagine a modern P-III or Xeon box pushing close to a GHz speed and hundreds of MB's of today's cheap memory with fast Ultra160SCSI disks running Linux or FreeBSD could handle thousands of simultaneous IMAP/POP users with ease.
While I feel Microsoft's software is substantially better than any solution one could deploy with Linux, I do feel their licensing structures have gotten entirely out of hand in recent years.
Competition on this level will cause Microsoft to revisit their pricing and become more competitive. Essentionally causing the same thing to happen to MS as MS caused to Sun, Novell, Oracle, etc. when they came in and undercut those companies by half or more.
look it up, its called RIS and works under win2k. you set up one server and install all the software and needed changes. now you start a win2k install on any box and point it to the server. its installed exactly to your liking. most companies just use a hard drive blaster anyway. check out this doc for more info
. as p
http://www.microsoft.com/ISN/whitepapers/p56782
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
This reads *exactly* like what my life was like, late '97 to late '99. Uglier and uglier NT network (we had roughly 35 NT domains with only 2000 users), more and more fragile services (mostly mail and printing because our file serving was from NetWare), higher and higher costs (and more and more time) to get anything done.
I kept suggesting Linux (yes, back then). I even setup a non-crashing backup print server--but I was the only one who used it regularly (of course, everybody used it about twice a week....). Unfortunately three factors worked against me:
1) Linux wasn't quite as big then as it is now.
2) The network admin was nearly techno-illiterate. She could do the stuff she had been trained to in a couple of NT classes but nothing else. Linux scared her. And she wasn't the kind of person to educate herself to conquer fear--her method was to insult and ignore the source.
3) We were about 1 hour from Redmond. It's hard to shield yourself from The Presence when you are that close.
324006
First question: will it run my software? Answer: in health care buy windows.
Second question: is it cost justified? Answer: will it run my software?
Answer: buy windows. Linux is not an option for most of the systems we are considering. Articles like this one don't help it either -- real, verifiable, usable data would.
Wow, I can read that in so many ways...
First, I don't buy into the credibility of the story. I want to know hard information about this particular case study. While the generalities of the story rings basically true to my ears (probably because I want it to be true) the absense of referencable specifics make the story factually questionable.
Second, maybe it's just my lack of experience on the matter, but there were some licensing costs there that I never even heard of before. Maybe it's simply because I never bothered to notice. But "I don't buy it" also means that I don't pay for MS's licensing costs so I wouldn't know. What I do know is that Microsoft has been riding on the momentum of accepted piracy for so long and without a doubt, it was intentional. It's like a drug dealer -- get'm hooked and then charge them for it dearly later. Corporate America and hundreds of thousands of IT professionals are frightened to death about the "withdrawls" from Microsoft and like an addicted smoker, they would rather pay the costs of continued use rather than kick a bad habit and do what's best for the "body."
I'm all for MS Windows as a client, to be honest. It works good [enough] for the end user and it's damned easy. And since MS Office enjoys enough corporate ubiquity, it's still potentially damaging to use anything but MS Office where different companies do business together. HOWEVER that has no bearing on the server side which is exactly why it has historically been an easier market to enter. The geniuses behind the SaMBa project are probably the biggest heros in the story of Linux as they enabled something that simply made it all work.
So I'd like to see some follow-up like knowing more specifics such as what company this is, when it happened and such. Who from RedHat can confirm this story?
I want to believe it so badly that I almost do. More importantly, I want something I can use later without looking like a moron unable to answer the practical questions.
It seems to me that the commercial structure of MS's software makes it harder to admin.
I just wiped off my laptop, and as I write this I'm in the process of reinstalling windows and office on it. I installed W2K and Office 2000, and I'm in the process of patching everything. This is literally a 4 or 5 hour job. Now admittedly this is a slow machine (233Mhz, 228MB of ram), but that's still pretty crazy. And I have a DSL line -- this isn't
What if I had to do 700 of these things?
How does central application installation work under Windows? Is it even possible? How do they keep track of the licenses? Can you patch office once and have the changes propograte throughout the network?
Imagine a Linux network where applications are all stored on central file servers. You don't have to worry about whether or not someone has their KWord license. You can just let everyone read the NFS shares.
My point is that apart from the licensing fees, there's an overhead assocated with keeping track of who can run what. To protect their interests, MS has set things up in ways that make administration harder.
Things like centralized office suite administration haven't been high profile in linux up until now -- the focus has been on making usable office apps, things that don't totally suck in comparision to M$ Office.
But I think there are some real opportunities to do things that MS will have more trouble pulling off, on account of the licensing.
apt-get is a beautiful thing. What would an enterprise level apt-get look like? What would allow you to install software or updates on 100,000 machines? Would would allow you to roll back a bad update on all of those changes? What would allow you to keep track of different software configurations for different job descriptions or hardware configurations? What would it take for admins to control what users can do with apt-get, so they don't break things?
What would it take for R3dH@t (or someone else) to feed updates into a large corporations office appication framework automatically?
It seems to me that Linux had a lot of groundwork laid for this sort of thing, and that it could be made to happen more easily than a lot of people think.
I think that everyone had a moment with apt-get. You've set up a new system, it doesn't have much on it, and someone sends you a zip file. So you say, "apt-get unzip", and 20 seconds later you can unzip the file.
In a windows environment, that works with zip (although it's definitely harder and slower). But what about Visio? If someone sends you a Visio document, you can't just download Visio.
We, on the other hand, can deploy a desktop that will download our diagram program on the fly when someone clicks on the file icon.
What does that do to admin costs? (Or: what does that do to our jobs?)
I believe that network aware package administration is going to be the thing that wins the enterprise for linux in the end.
I am a little interested as to who everyone is so concerned about companies adopting linux? I think I've heard all the arguments: it's good for the Linux community, it's good for the companies(and the economy), it whacks Bill in the balls . . . whatever. But in my opinion, the beauty of Linux lies in the fact that it is used largely by users who want to use it, not those who have to. And it makes no sense to me why you or I should care whether corp X uses Linux, BSD, Windows, or an old Lisp machine unless it personally affects us(through our jobs or investments).
I am not trying to sound elitist -- I am not saying that "those not enlightened enough to use Linux should not." What I am saying, is that mindshare, both in the terms of users and corporations is rather irrelevant. Besides, if you believe that Linux is perfect for everything(and I don't -- my Windows machine is a great equivalent of my Dreamcast), then those corporations who use Linux will have lower costs and a competitive edge, resulting in economic success and in the displacement of Windows using companies. If this is what's happening now with the adoption of Linux, it makes no sense for us to care about it as anything more than a vindication of the OS, and I think there are very few people at Slashdot who need convincing.
What saddens me is the decline of the hacker ethic and the change of emphasis from "Lets make it better so people use it" to "lets yell louder about how good it is so people use it." And what saddens me even more is that I am wasting time writing this and not coding . . . I guess I am being a little hypocritical. But still, I am convinced there is no reason cheer after a company's adoption of Linux and boo after hearing "Windows." The reason people cheer at football games is that they can't come down to the field and help out. Well, in the case of linux, we can.
In fact, the most important thing about the article is the observation that Linux can be adopted piecemeal while Microsoft tends to want you to change all your software, and often much of your hardware, at once. In an economic downturn, the last thing you want to do is spend a bunch of money for the chance to take a leap of faith and shift your paradigm. Instead, more evolutionary tactics are called for, which just happens to be what Linux or *BSD is good for.
The use of Linux doesn't promise a radical improvement in the way you do business, but it also doesn't have a lot of the risk associated with a paradigm shift. Companies hedging their bets would do well to at least consider not buying Microsoft.
Hi!
Like others, I'm a bit disturbed by the anonymous "case study" that was presented in this article. I'd feel a lot more comfortable knowing who the company is, and some third-party verification that such a change actually took place.
But there's no denying the central argument: Microsoft's licensing fees have dramatically jumped in price, and the terms of their licensing agreements have gotten substantially worse. Yesterday, for instance, I received an email from Microsoft regarding SQL Server licensing. In short, I have till October 1 to upgrade all of my SQL Server 7 licenses to SQL Server 2000--or I lose the right to to "upgrade" price for SQL Server 2000. If I choose to upgrade after October 1 I will have to pay the full retail price.
I'm a big believer in the concept of "don't fix what isn't broken." While the move from SQL Server 7.0 to SQL Server 2000 isn't a big deal (at least for our SS7 applications) I see little reason to spend bucks upgrading server databases that don't need to be changed. But if I need to migrate those down the road, I'll have to pay substantially higher fees--the pay-me-now-or-pay-me-later demand from Microsoft just infuriates me.
But the licensing problem gets worse. Microsoft has dramatically raised their prices and dramatically restricted their terms. Case in point: we're starting to develop a project for a small startup non-profit organization. This is a group that does physical therapy on horseback for handicapped kids--they used to be part of Easter Seals, but Easter Seals has dropped them. (Long, sad story.) They're on their own, and they need to get organized. We want to help them (we're working pro bono publico) and we're recommending a "virtual office" concept. Don't build/buy/rent an office building: instead, let volunteers and paid staff function from home. Manage the office functions in a web application, handle the phones with call forwarding and related telephony stuff, and so forth--it's the 21st century, and there's lots of cool things we can do to hold costs down so program funds can be focused on kids and horses.
Sounds great, right? Except--we run right smack into Microsoft licensing. We're a Microsoft shop--and part of the benefit of doing pro bono projects like this is the hands-on experience we get with new development tools. This would be the perfect project for Microsoft's dot-Net technologies. That is, until we go live--and have to pay $2500 per processor for the server license for the OS, and another $2500 per processor for the SQL Server 2000 license. I'm entirely willing to develop the site for Equi-Librium pro bono--I am also willing to pay Microsoft a reasonable fee for the software we'll use. But five thousand U.S. currency one-dollar simolians is most definitely not a reasonable fee.
So this lets-all-get-experience project may well get done with PHP, PostgreSQL, and FreeBSD. And when we're done we'll have experience with a bunch of non-Microsoft tools, and we may have a different answer for clients who want scaleable applications but can't (or don't want to) pay Microsoft's fees.
Despite the propaganda, Microsoft didn't win the PC wars by skullduggery or deceit. They won by targetting the "influential end user" (their words) and providing lots of information. Software consultants are precisely the kind of people that Microsoft has depended upon, and we've been a very loyal Microsoft shop. We've benefitted enormously from the Microsoft Developer Network program, and we've steered a lot of clients to Microsoft-based solutions (and thus Microsoft operating systems) over the years. But Microsoft's pricing, and licensing, and upgrade policies have us--among the most loyal of Microsoft loyalists--actively questioning our relationship to them.
John Murdoch
Wind Gap Technology Group
Isn't that the final irony that the biggest wealthiest and some would say most sophisticated companies will be the biggest consumers of NT-2K-XP while everyone else just gets by with fast good reliable stable safe open source. Fortune 500 firms will be able to afford all the convolutions of Windows code and will smugly assume that they're getting the best bang for the buck. They're not that sensitive to support costs so they'll be fat dumb and happy. Smaller firms, nonprofits and the like will use anything but Windows code.
But the biggest irony of all will be that MS will finally be an enterprise provider not because their stuff is any good but because large companies can afford it.
If you stopped to read the rest of my comment, I also said that our machine here at the office has an uptime of 80+ days right now (last downtime was for a hardware upgrade). In fact, I just checked with the admin and he has never had a crash of that server. All downtime was hardware related.
That's also an interesting point for NT4. Apparently all BSOD's are NT's fault. So if a 3rd party driver shit all over itself, NT's apparently at fault. NT must BSOD in these instances because you don't know what else the driver shit on, and killing drivers is not a great idea. NT got a very bad rep for that when it's wasn't totally their fault.
And it was 3 machines + 3 backups. Thus 7000 users (AFAIK) over 3 machines is 2333/machine, because the backups are used if something goes wrong.
If God gave us curiosity
Um, WTF are you smoking? I can't recall ever hearing of any Open Source company using any sort of pressure on customers - the whole point of Open Source is that the customer can go somewhere else if they're not satisfied, so you have to try harder.
Microsoft, on the other hand, is well known for pressuring OEMs and customers on licensing issues. Being a public company doesn't seem to have stopped them from employing those tactics at all, nor has the bad publicity that they've gained from it. You've got a much better chance of falling afoul of Microsoft than you do of having Linus or some other geek stopping by to "persuade" you.
I agree that it would help if the company would identify themselves, but it seems likely to me that the author is one of their IT guys and isn't allowed to bring the company's name into the discussion without permission. You can't give the article 100% credence, but considering that the licensing issues described have been verified by other posters here, it appears to be at least partially truthful.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
Great comment. It seems to me that GNU/Linux has many advantages not normally discussed. Your comment begins to show more of the potential advantages.
Also, Windows has many disdvantages most people don't understand. For example, with Microsoft Windows there is a potential of unrepairable operating system corruption. Microsoft Windows has a file called the registry (SYSTEM.DAT) that often becomes damaged and unrepairable. Below is a message copied without change from a Microsoft error display. As you read it, please keep in mind that registry damage is extremely common.
Registry Repair Results
Windows found an error in your system files and was unable to fix the problem. Try deleting some files to free up disk space on your Windows drive. If that doesn't work then you will need to install Windows to a new directory.
The computer with the bad registry has gigabytes of free disk space. "Installing Windows to a new directory" also means re-installing ALL the applications, and driver updates, and so on. "Installing Windows to a new directory" is equivalent to re-formatting your hard disk and starting over. This is not file system corruption, which is easily fixed. This is unrepairable operating system corruption.
Please also realize that this is only one of MANY such issues.
One reason to use GNU/Linux is that it is of much higher quality. Linux doesn't seem to have the same vulnerabilities as Windows. I don't think there is a Linux message that says, "The corruption is too great to repair. You will have to install everything again."
Why does Microsoft use a single file for most configuration information? Apparently Microsoft uses this as a method of copy protection. A user can copy a program's files, but the program will not operate without the registry entries. Unfortunately for Microsoft Windows users, this single file can become corrupted by a buggy application. If the corruption is great enough, the entire operating system becomes corrupted and unusable and unrepairable.
Bush's education improvements were
I couldn't disagree with you more. Many pundits think that the reason that Linux is being installed is due to the fact that it is more stable or more secure, or more whatever. The pundits couldn't be more wrong. The real reason that Linux gets installed is that for many uses it is "good enough" and the price is right.
If you have some monster database, and that database costs you one grillion dollars every second that it isn't available, then you bust out your checkbook and pay for Oracle and a pile of the best Oracle DBAs you can find. However, most folks can get by with much less than the very best, and increasingly folks are shopping around. Paying a premium for software features that you don't need and won't use is stupid.
For example, in one of my projects I needed a database, not a fancy database, but something a step up from Access. Microsoft wanted me to go with SQL Server, but instead I spent the extra time to learn how to administer PostgreSQL. That extra time was time well spent. I now have several PostgreSQL databases deployed, with a fairly significant cost savings over MS SQL Server. I feel especially smug about my decision because PostgreSQL is getting ready to beta their 7.2 version which removes my last major problem with PostgreSQL, a vacuum will no longer require an exclusive lock on the table. Now I can use PostgreSQL in more demanding projects where having tables unavailable, if only for a moment, is unacceptable.
Could I have accomplished the same thing with MS SQL Server and Microsoft's development tools? Sure I could have. However, PostgreSQL, and the other Open Source tools I use, did the job for less money. More importantly, my PostgreSQL machines are completely off Microsoft's upgrade treadmill. I don't have to worry about how Microsoft is going to change their licensing agreements. Upgrades are free, and I have the choice of several organizations for support.
If you really believe that price is not a factor, then I have some software to sell you :).
Running exchange2000. Unlike 5.5, which has it's own directory service, Exch2000 lives off of the AD. Very nice.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Microsoft haters still have something to worry about. The company operates with a 40% profit margin. Only the mob and the phone company can get away with that kind of margin.
What this means is that Microsoft could substantially reduce all their prices and still make a reasonable margin - one comparable to other companies like AOL whose margin is 1%.
All Microsoft really needs to do as free competition arises is reduce price structure enough to keep the free solutions out because it costs to much to switch. This cost of re-tooling will ring true with CTOs, and they will be quite happy to keep paying what they've been paying.
However, Microsoft wants it all. The new licensing strategy with XP intends to increase company gross by 60% over the next 5 years or so. Or kill it, one of the two. But a monster with 30 BILLION dollars hard cash in the bank is pretty hard to kill. They can come back failure after failure if necessary, and still buy all their competitors.
As to the credibility of the story, I find it entirely believable. One of the large issues is that the story compares fairly incompetent NT engineers with competent linux ones. Even so, server administration requires much less admin time on linux - we estimate it is a 3 to 1 difference.
I think that what brings MicroSquish down won't be the antitrust litigation, it will be case after case of NT collapsing under its own weight.
I can't wait for the job ads to start saying: "NT sysadmin needed: Must know Linux and Samba."
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
dlb, we must have very different support needs. Microsoft has never been able to help my company with Windows operating system problems. They never know the answers, and can't find them. True, we only call with difficult problems.
My experience has been identical to that discussed in the article published by the Boston Mac User's Group (BMUG) about who is better at answering Microsoft product technical support calls: Microsoft Technical Support, or The Psychic Friends Network? You can read it at http://www.bmug.org/news/articles/MSvsPF.html
Bush's education improvements were
I used NDS years ago - it was awesome. I couldn't believe it when the company I was consulting for decided to replace their fast, easy to manage, reliable network with NT.
It was surreal actually - my assistant and I - that's right, two people - managed a network of about 3000 desktops, three locations, and half a dozen servers (plus these horrible cc-mail "servers" that took up most of our time - really they were client PC's running a cheesy routing application). We did everything from backups to managing users, reseting passwords, etc.
It took a team of consultants (Anderson - bright guys, but brainwashed by MS) about six months to replace the thing with about a dozen massive NT boxes. Their uptime and performance was horrible even though they had more and better hardware, plus it was a nightmare to administer.
Anyway, that's all totally off-topic. NDS really was awesome - a pleasure to administer. Even years later I've yet to see anything that comes close in terms of management and scalability. Unfortunately I don't think it has a future. Novell once had a dominent marketshare in file & print servers and they squandered it through mis-management. Still, if you don't mind the risk that the product will disappear, I'm sure current versions of NDS are even better (I stopped using Novell around the time 4.1 came out).
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
Last week I became a Tech guy at my school,
they called me 3 days before it started, and asked me to help setup 80 new computers.
While I was putting Windows on a few, I setup Linux on one, and showed it to the tech director.
He was really impressed, and now I get to setup 2 labs of 30 computers apiece, and find out what happens from there.
One of the 'hidden' costs of using MS products is the amount of time & resources spent simply staying current, in case of the feared 'surprise Audit' where MS basically threatens to ruin you if they so much as find one license out of order.
IT's not the cost of the OS for each workstation... it's the recurring costs in upgrading, new licensing schemes, auditing...
Plus rediculous non-recyclable licences such as those for Terminal Services (From what I recall, if you license one workstatoin to use them, you can't later move it to a new one if tha tworkstation breaks)
Network installation? SUre, it can be done.. but nothing like what you can accomplish simply and easily and *logically* with a unix network.
THe main problem with IIS and IIS based apps is that they leak memory (IIS does that). So if yuo have some webapplications running, with a lot of visitors daily, the memory gets pretty low. (I've experienced similar stuff on apache powered sites, why are webservers so crappy?).
You don't have to reboot however. Just stop / start the W3svc and you're mem is freed. (Or kill the inetserv.exe process when you stopped the service). Can be done in 10 seconds. In fact, in win2k, when you kill inetserv (the IIS main process) it's restarted automatically (hehe, crashproof).
This way I keep up my NT based webservers for months. Once in a while they have to reboot due to security patches, but that's all.
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
(Save the MCSE jokes, plz)
Never underestimate the relief of true separation of Religion and State.
Why are you people so skeptical?
I've noticed that a lot of posters to this thread seem to have the opinion that article is a fairy tale. Anandtech seems to me to have a reputation for impartiality, their hardware reveiws are quite thourough and unbiased as far as I can see.
What you are seeing is the classic strategy of Microsoft shills and lackeys on slashdot using standard astroturfing techniques to slant the apparent tone of the conversation in a manner which is conducive to their PR goals. This has been followed by a few more reasonable people who have either been taken in by the "reasonable" tone of skepticism expressed (many astroturfing efforts have been laughed out of here and elsewhere because of the ludricous stances they have taken, however, Microsoft shills and PR-consultants have grown more subtle and clever over time, and have refined their astroturfing techniques quite a bit), or are falling prey to the misguided desire to appear more thoughtful by expressing skepticism, whether or not it is at all well founded.
As someone who has helped numerous companies, including my current employer, switch wholesale to GNU/Linux on both the desktop and server side I can say that the story rings very true. It should also be pointed out that there are numerous, confirmed instances of Microsoft threatening their customers with inflated licensing fees, expensive license audits, etc. in retaliation for deploying a competitor's product in-house. This sort of behavior was particularly common during the early Internet Explorer vs. Netscape struggle, and is playing no small part in the ongoing DOJ v Microsoft anti-trust trial. I suspect only the most ardent Microsoft apologist or supporter would have any shred of doubt as to the likelihood that such tactics will almost certainly be turned against firms trying to make the transition from Windows to GNU/Linux, and until a company is fully weaned from Microsoft (and these transitions can take months or even years, depending on the complexity and entrenchment of the existing legacy systems) they are vulnerable to this sort of retaliation.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
But you can't undercut 0 or you'll get a divide by 0 error (or Overflow in Visual Basic!?! - how retarded is that???).
Speaking purely of licensing, MS can never undercut free apps. That's one reason why they've been looking to other revenue sources.
Developers: We can use your help.
Just in case nobody has posted this yet, the author of the article at Anandtech explains that there's an NDA in force. It'll be eighteen months before he can reveal the name of the company. You'll have to search for "Paul Sullivan" to see his comment.
Failure is its own reward.
Reality is defined by the maddest person in the room
A friend of mine was lead administrator for a $200,000,000 per year company. The company had problems with Microsoft SQL Server. Microsoft was unable to fix the problems for more than a year. (I reduced the gross income of the company, so that it cannot be identified.)
You said, "It's a mixed bag..." We have learned to live with Microsoft. Can't we find ways of making Linux support work for us, also?
As someone said in an earlier post, when you have problems with Linux and other GNU programs, it is usually possible to communicate directly with the writers of the software. Maybe what we are seeing here is a lack of creativity on the part of Red Hat. They could try to get software repairs done on a "best effort" basis.
I've had really bad experience with Microsoft technical support, and so did the large company I mentioned. In the real world, would Linux be worse?
Bush's education improvements were
I was replying to his comment that he thinks that 1 pentium class server could replace a 6 server NT cluster
But what if your total workload is small enough to be handled by a single box? If, as the article states, such functions as mail, print, and file serving need to be handled by separate dedicated machines for reasons of stability, not performance, then that puts a lower bound on the number of servers you need to have ([#server machines] >= [# server applications] -- and presumably database and web serving would be boxes #4 and #5), no matter how small the total workload actually is.
That would seem to significantly raise the entry-level price point for small shops whose total workload would otherwise be nowhere near the capacity of even a single box.
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}
Are you a websurfer/email reader/office program user?
If so, Linux is right there, right now, and you don't even have to hunt down anything. If you start with Mandrake (buy the powerpack edition just for fun) you will be ready to rock right after the install is done. No joke.
Are you a gamer?
If so, you are generally locked out of the latest 3D gorefests, unless you dual-boot. However, this doesn't mean you have no games- Loki has many decent and recent offerings, and there are many highly appealing games that just aren't in the EB shelves. The real classics are certainly available for Linux, as well- they're either remade from scratch (i.e. freeciv) or ported (loki's work.)
Note also that many gaming companies are considering Linux ports, often at the behest of their own developers.
Are you a graphic designer?
High end graphics are a niche, and to write them for Linux means that the authors must target a niche of a niche. This having been said, there are solutions.
When speaking of Linux graphics, you can't get away without mentioning the GIMP. Some people will swear is as good as Photoshop, and for most people (i.e. 99% of the folks that would warez it!) it really is. However, if you do prepress work, you will run into limitations very quickly (not the least of which is the total lack of CMYK/process color support!) The GIMP is designed for screen-target, RGB photo editing and web graphics design. You can try the GIMP out on windows, too, if you want.
Corel makes a set of Linux graphics tools, matching their Windows lineup. I haven't had the cash to get the whole enchilada yet, but I have used the freely available Photo-Paint they offer. I found it to be rather sluggish, but workable, which is why I am mulling the purchase of the whole suite (at $300 last I checked.)
I hear there is another company working on an Illustrator/Quark combo clone for Linux (based on something for Irix, IIRC.) We shall see.
3D graphics are advancing quite nicely on Linux, with major 3D artists already beginning to move to Linux due to hardware cost issues. If you want to just fiddle around in 3D, Blender can be a nice tool. It's free, but very difficult to figure out at first.
Overall, graphics is one arena to watch closely under Linux. The expert users that often populate the graphics crowd are really looking hard at Linux for the future.
To conclude, Linux is at the point where the normal user can comfortable enjoy it, and more specialized users are moving in.
If you aren't sure, just remember that you can always dualboot and learn while retaining your Windows capabilities as you normally would.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Agreed. The entire problem that the company in the article faced was NOT caused by their software selection or their NOS. It was caused because they did not employ an internal DIT-styled position or internal technical consultant. They have nobody in that company to explain the situation from a 3rd-person perspective. Its just a bunch of execs listening to MS FUD on one side and RedHat FUD on the other side.
Won't go with AD because the PDC/BDC model wasn't effective? Yah, that makes a ton of since... MS isn't actually trying to IMPROVE their scalability. They just want you to buy into a new technology. Bah, those stingy execs need to get a clue and hire some more knowledgable (and costly) IT people. The tiny increase in salary will get them a tremendous boost in productivity and save them a ton of money in the long run.
Eventually, RedHat will screw them over and they'll move on to another outsourced consulting company.
Protector of Capitalist views,
Meorah
Back in days of old when I was young and foolish I thought, "what can it hurt, I'll add the local users to the admin group on their boxes." Yes yes, if you've done it or seen somebody do you it you're laughing at me right now. That's fine. So the net became this big thing and everyone needed a browser on their desktop and email attachments were great and look at all the things people send me that I can double click!
Right. But you don't have viable options on NT. Though you could give non-admins the right to install software or use SMS (another expensive, MS product).
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
While it seems quite true that linux may be a very good alternative to NT given Microsoft's extravagant prices, what if cost is not really an issue, like in university enviornments?
Certainly in some places, like computer science classrooms, it is the only way to go.
However, I have a friend in a similar position who complains that Linux does not perform as well with 200 students programing on it as NT does. Not sure if this is just because NT is harder to write programs that interface with the lower-level interfaces. So the choice is up to you. (My suspician is that the Linux servers are poorly configured and are not adequately protected from such things as fork bombs.)
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Hi!
I appreciate your advice--but I must disagree. The differences between SQL Server 6.5 and SQL Server 7.0 are substantial--and very significant. There are significant performance and feature improvements in SQL Server 7.0 (and 2000) that make a very compelling case for upgrading 6.5 installations to 7.0.
Don't let the version numbers mislead you--SQL Server 6.5 is the last version of the source code developed by Sybase and jointly marketed with Microsoft. When Microsoft and Sybase "divorced" back in the '90s MS set about creating a completely new database product. Because of contractual limitations they continued evolutionary development of SQL Server 6.0 and 6.5--while building the new product (7.0) and deploying it internally within Microsoft.
SQL Server 7.0 is really a 1.0 product. It is a complete, from-the-ground-up rewrite of SQL Server. And while a lot of 1.0 Microsoft products are pretty dreadful (well, okay, practically all 1.0 Microsoft products are dreadful), SQL Server 7.0 positively rocks.
For starters, SQL Server does not require a fixed disk partition anymore--so resizing your database is no big deal. (We typically configure them to auto-grow, so we don't have to spend a lot of time monitoring available space.) The query optimization is dramatically enhanced. In 6.5 and earlier (and most competitive databases) the query optimizer quits when you add a fourth table to an INNER JOIN. In 7.0 and higher the query optimizer is substantially more robust--you can create JOINs with dozens of tables, review the execution plan, provide optimizer hints (hint: don't--the optimizer is very smart), and really get a handle on exactly what's going on. For data warehouse applications the query optimizer and query performance in general--alone--make upgrading from 6.5 a very good idea.
Another compelling feature is scalability: 7.0 handles very large tables, including full-text indexing, without breathing hard. We do a lot of performance testing on our projects--we have found performance testing with SQL Server 7.0 to be difficult because the database generally handles requests faster than we can create them. It takes serious work to maintain multiple SQL Server 7.0 connections from a single test machine--and if we're using a pool manager (such as COM+) we can run test scripts from more than a dozen machines (simulating hundreds of users) and still share a single connection.
In short, performance of SQL Server 7.0 is extremely good.
SQL Server 2000 is also good stuff--in particular, I really like the new User-Defined Functions (a feature Oracle has had for years). But for solutions that have already been written for SQL Server 7.0 (that is, where we aren't going to do any new work, so UDFs aren't an issue) there's no compelling case to make the move.
Except Microsoft holding the "Software Assurance" gun to my head....
This is great, if you can stand up and say "Hey, everything will now be Win2000. if you dont like it then leave..." in a mixed environment the lowest common denominator wins. I have 2.5 million dollars worth of ad insertion gear (Mpeg2 playback units. each decoding and displaying 24 seperate simultanious(sp?) higher than DVD quality video.) that CANNOT be migrated to Windows 2000. the company said ..."Nope we aint gonna do it, W2K has way too much overhead and offeres nothing for the playback units." Basically, I was told that until all hardware is upgraded to PIII866(minimum) machines and newer multi-mpeg decoders that are supported under w2k (Which was when hell freezes from what a tech told me) they aren't even going to start development on a W2K version. and a very large number of vertical hardware and software companies are doing this.
.the others act as standby...but outside attacks are easy to avoid....)
So we're stuck. Domain based security, The PDC is nt4.0 and the BDC's. W2k CANNOT be locked down in this situation.... I know, I asked MS, techrepublic, everyone has offered solutions for big $$$ but it comes to one point. as long as there is 1 Nt4.0 machine in the network W2K security additions are nullified... which is only an annoyance to me. If the building is infiltrated then yes, the evil hackers will get me... but they are not getting past the firewalls, nor the rotating POP.. (daily, our POP roatates from one geographical location to another..
My biggest problem is sales people.... install AOL on their laptop, and management will not fire them even if they ignore company policy... hey they're making the money not the IT department...
The best fun is that corperate is asking us to migrate whatever we can to linux... nothing like having money tight to get feet in the door!
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Well, that's another damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't thing then. If they don't move the video drivers into system space, they get yelled at because the performance sucks. If they do, then video driver crashes are OBVIOUSLY MS's fault...
And also, you can't compare linux NOW to NT4... Back when Linux was compared to NT4 in '99, NT4 creamed linux. However now linux is MUCH better, and I haven't been able to find any conclusive comparisons between linux vs 2k at all, so I really can't say.
If God gave us curiosity