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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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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