Verizon Switches Programmers to Linux

wackysootroom writes: "According to this article at News.com, Verizon saved $6 million in equipment costs by switching its programmers from UNIX and Windows workstations to Linux workstations running OpenOffice. The article says that the average cost per desktop workstation was cut from $22,000 to $3,000." jeffmurphy noted the same story, and wonders "What kind of (Windows) desktops were they buying previously at an average cost of $22k? It seems like software alone wouldn't account for that big of a cut."

Comments

$22k per machine?

[TechnoLust]

I wondered about that, too. Then I read this in the article:

Fundamental differences in how Intel and HP processors treat binary numbers meant that some software was very difficult to translate, leading to delays that kept newly purchased equipment idle.

That seems to me like they were using mostly HP-UX machines. It's coming from the news media, so the figures are probably exaggerated anyway.

$22,000 for Windows? No... Read the Article...

[Zwack]

Linux, a clone of Unix, is similar enough that programmers don't need the more expensive Unix workstations

That average of $22,000 per desktop was not for Windows machines. They were buying machines for their Unix developers to work on... Sure they bought the top of the range hardware from Sun/HP. I've never yet met a developer who would argue that they could do their job with a bottom of the line machine.

Z.

EASILY cost $22,000/workstation

[Marx_Mrvelous]

Two years ago the HP C3600 workstation, single-CPU 1gig RAM dual 9gig SCSI hard drives went for just over $20,000. Add in hardware and software maintenance, then any upgrades/software (like HP Ansi C compiler) and $22,000 is not a lot of money.

These machines have been HPs Workstation line for a while, it looks like they were with HP, so yes, they're asving $19,000/desktop.

They probably include...

[Caduceus1]

...costs like helpdesk support, floor support people, etc. UNIX desktops are a lot easier to administer remotely in a lot of cases - I fix them all the time. The Windows boxes involve a lot more interactive help...

Re: They probably include...

[Black Parrot]

> ...costs like helpdesk support, floor support people, etc. UNIX desktops are a lot easier to administer remotely in a lot of cases - I fix them all the time. The Windows boxes involve a lot more interactive help...

Others are making a good case that the price was the HP hardware, but here's an interesting factoid I'll plug in here anyway:

About a decade ago there was supposedly a study saying that it costs companies $15K/desktop/year to run PCs, with the biggest part of that cost being the lost productivity from having low-paid secretaries and clerks constantly running down the hall and interrupting high-paid engineers etc., to get help on some trivial computer task.

$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[jc42]

A few months back, I helped some friends price out a "full" development Windows XP system. The idea was to get whatever was needed to do sufficient testing to guarantee that their software (mostly written in C and C++) would run on any Windows XP system. It turned out that the compiler was just the start of it. When they had a full list of all the libraries, packaging software, and testing packages that they'd need, the price was somewhat over $20,000.

Microsoft developer licenses can be pricey.

They decided to go with the Mac (which they already had) and linux (which they deemed a growing market). Later, when and if they got enough sales, they'd reconsider XP.

Re:Programmers and *Office?

[ptomblin]

You've obviously had very limited experience in the real world. Big companies don't work like garage shops. Generally, the bigger the company, the more likely you are to be bombarded with documents written in Word, Power Point presentations, MS Project files, etc, from the ever increasing levels of management above you, secretaries below you, and ancilliary support personell (graphic designers, QA departments, documentation, tech support, etc) beside you. 50% of it is crap that you can safely ignore, 35% of it is crap that you can't tell if it's crap until you read it, and the other 15% actually applies to you.

Besides MS Office files, my current nightmare consists of Lotus Notes, the single worst computer application ever written, and Photoshop. Thankfully, Office, Notes and now Photoshop all run under Crossover Office.

And right after you figure out how to use a VPN to log in from on the road to check your email, some bozo, possibly the CEO, will send out a 50Mb power point presentation with sound and cutesy clip art and animations to tell you what could have easily fit in a 1K ascii text file.

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[zog karndon]

What the heck did you have them buy? You can get an MSDN Universal subscription for $2500, which includes Dev Studio, ALL versions of Windows (XP, Me, 98, 2K Workstation/Server, etc.). Compuware DevPartner is $1500; Wise installer is $750. That still leaves $15,000 unaccounted for.

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[kawika]

>> Microsoft developer licenses can be pricey

Sounds like you didn't know that developers can get every business and OS product that Microsoft makes for every international language in the MSDN Subscription on DVD for $2,500. Most US developers would only need the Professional subscription which is $1,200. That includes MS Office, Visual Studio and all the compilers, Project, SQL Server, SDKs, DDKs, every version of Windows since 95, and a year of updates. The MSDN versions of most products allow 10 licenses, which is plenty for most developers. The price of the Windows licenses alone far exceeds the cost of the subscription.

>> Later, when and if they got enough sales, they'd reconsider XP.

I don't know their application so I can't say for sure, but in most cases that's ass-backwards. You usually want to build your product for the biggest market first.

That's funny

[Anonymous Coward]

What's odd about this is that I'm a contract web developer at Verizon. Not only am I running Windows 2000 on my workstation. I'm an ASP.NET developer! I deploy my application onto Windows 2000 clusters connected to SQL 2000 DBs.

If Verizon has switched all of their developers to Unix workstations someone has missed me and everyone in this ginormous cube farm they call an office.

I'll take the PC

[dunham]

At my last job my desktop was a dual 866MHz PIII Dell 2450 with 2 19" LCDs. It only had 768MB of RAM, but I'd definitely take it over most Sun machines that you'd see near a desk.

On it, I ran XEmacs, Mozilla, Oracle, an complex XML/XSL based Java web application, two other Java applications that fetch and process data, and the usual desktop junk (gnome) without any sluggishness.

We put smaller 2450's in production to replace U80s and E450s with more processors because the Dell boxes ran our Java app a lot faster. (The web app was at least twice as fast.)

Re:What kind of desktops were they buying for 22k

[Anonymous Coward]

Congratulations! You can do most (maybe all) of your work on your Sunblade. Or install Linux on your x86 and do most of your work there. You can run Windows-only apps inside VMWare (~$300), and often using Wine.

1. kivio, dia

2. MrProject

3. OpenOffice

4. xpdf, gv, ps2pdf

5. openssh, telnet, kermit

6. Mozilla

7. inn

8. openssh publickey

9. wine?

10. wine?

11. tell Nortel about HTML

12. tell Nokia about HTML

13. tell Ericsson about HTML

14. XFree86

15. java runs on linux

16. xmms

17. gaim

18. dip, wvdial, kde

19 Nortel VPN (for winxp and smp support)

20. gzip, bzip2, zip

21. wine?

Re:$22,000 for Windows? Easy

[GigsVT]

ou usually want to build your product for the biggest market first.

If this is any indication of actual OS distribution, then XP is no where near the largest market.

Win98 43%
Win2000 20%
XP 17%

From a (former) Verizon programmer

[cporter]

I worked at Verizon on the east coast '96 - '98 when they were Bell Atlantic.

While I had a P133 at home, we had 40Mhz sparcstations on our desk. 256MB RAM, 320MB HDD. Had to run most of our apps off of the UE10K in the data center if we wanted decent performance. Got busted for doing so, occasionally. Nobody had anything near top-of-the-line. Not even the admins.

It was actually a great environment to work in. The application architecture had been designed by Bellcore, the now-non-existant technology company for the Baby Bells.

The endian-ness cited in the article is mainly due to legacy sources. On the software front-end side, we never had to deal with it. (And I learned a whole hell of a lot about Motif) On the data side, though, we had to deal with endian-ness and EBCDIC-to-ASCII nastiness via a stupid gateway that just injected null into any byte stream that contained non-printable characters. Zero-terminated C strings don't like nulls. At least I got to do some Java.