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Verizon Switches Programmers to Linux

Posted by timothy on from the these-numbers-need-some-looking-at dept.

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."

1 of 240 comments (clear)

  1. Replacing real workstations with Pee Cees? Eeew. by nbvb · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yuck.
    I'm sure that $22k was for a real workstation, like an IBM zSeries or an HP Visualize or a Sun Blade 1k/2k (Or U60/U80).

    I'm a sysadmin at a large company and I've got a Blade 1000 on my desk (with Sun's 24" LCD + XVR-1000 video board, thankyouverymuch :)

    Anyway, the LCD is somewhat excessive, but the workstation certainly isn't. I'm constantly compiling code and doing testing on my desktop -- I need a good, reliable piece of hardware that'll function under stress.

    A cheap Pee Cee running some Yugoslavian 14-year-old's idea of a kernel?

    Forget it!

    The other thing that nobody mentioned is that that $22,000 workstation will probably last 6 or 7 years. Not so with that cheap PC.

    I had one developer who was still using his SPARCstation 10 until less than a month ago when we replaced it with a spare Ultra 2. Why? Because it still worked. All he used it for was basically an X display via SSH into the development boxes....

    Would the Dell-of-the-week from 1991 still be useful today? Somehow I doubt it.

    You get what you pay for. And sometimes, not even that.

    --NBVB