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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."
Micosoft Office License Fees - $450
Visual Studio ( Development ) Fees - $2000
Windows itself License Fees - $199
Ok - That's less than $3K and that is assuming they paid retail. The real answer is in the article - the $22K also includes Unix boxes. I know we all enjoy blaming Microsoft but they are not the only one ringing up the bill here. I also think that this is typical press release inflation for the benefit on shareholders. Notice that they bury in the article the huge effort it took to rewrite the code.
Yes, but can you *imagine* the expense to go from HP/UX to XP? I'm sure Microsoft wanted Verizon to do that. At least HP/UX is somewhat similar to Linux, making the porting process simpler.
I would have probably wanted to keep my HP/UX Workstation. But I guess they were needing to be upgraded. So you go with the best tool for the job.
It's also good to see Verizon standardizing on one development platform. Even if they continue to use MSN on their phones and website.
-BrentTheres alot of operational software that is "Windows" only, even if the back end servers are unix based. I work for a wireless telco, so I will list all my software I use on a daily basis.
1. M$ Visio for all network diagrams.
2. M$ Project (Gotta read those due dates from project managers)
3. M$ Office - Most everything else.
4. Adobe PDFs
5. Putty - (Uses 850K of memory per instance compared to 22megs for SecureCRT, with multiple open, my pc is still usable!)
6. Mozilla - Little bit of a memory hog, but Its my favorite, skinned with orbital skin.
7. IE (Eroom, My god, support Mozilla damn it..)
8. Password safe (for my million passwords that change often)
9. Proxomitron (mostly for the proxy selector, big networks, dmz = lots o proxies)
10. Remedy Trouble Ticketing system. (Very nice product for trouble tickets, reports, etc.)
11. Helmsman for Nortel Documents.
12. Ned for Nokia docs.
13. Ericsson docs., still trying to get that program working. Looks like a dos program...
14. xwin32 (still downloading every 30 days, soon as that damn PO gets completed, I'll have my license... Everyone else uses the site licensed ReflectionsX)
15. Climax (cool name, lets me work on multple SGSNs at once. Written in java for windows.)
16. Winamp. (gotta have tunes, Digital-Imported Techno! Aqua Skin)
17. Trillian (Everybody has a different IM, and I only need 1, makes it easy to IM someone on a phone call for info..)
18. AT&T Global Dialer (Must say, for a modem connection, I dont get disconnected as much as my Earthlink account...)
19 Nortel VPN (for winxp and smp support)
20. Winzip 8.1 (Its even registered by our company!)
21. PocketPC software from M$ with gprs/cdpd modems.
I have a Sunblade (w/linux) next to me, but its mostly a gateway X box. I use screen alot, so I can disconnect, and let tasks run.
-
All comments are my own, not of my employeer...
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.
Nice troll I'll bite with some simple math. Even if you replace the PC every year for 6 years say with a $2000 PC you've spent $14,000 so you've still saved $8,000 per workstation. Even at $3000 a PC you're going to save $1000 on every workstation, not as much but it still starts to add up.
Now I'm going to go out on a limb and say they are probably going to get all those PCs from a contractor. I used to work for a University that was on such a contract with Dell. They lease from Dell and get a huge discount on their $3000 workstations (don't remember how much), Dell replaces the machines every 3 years. Even if they are paying full price ($3000), That's 2 sets in 6 years time, $6000 per workstation.
The Anti-Blog
I do not know who is that Verizon executive is, but certainly he has nothing to do with that part of Verizon IT I am working for.
...
Verizon corporate intranet site does not support Mozilla and has deficient support for Netscape users. Huge areas are accessible _only_ to MSIE users.
Corporate standard for e-mail client is Lotus Notes. Old sendmail based services are being phased out and hundreds of people are being converted to Notes. Last time I checked, no client for Lotus Notes was available for any free Unices, and no promises for it to be released in any foreseeable future were given.
Coprorate VPN only works for Windows NT+ clients.
I could continue enumerating facts like this for a very long time.
Life is not easy for BSD or Linux users around here and it is getting worse. True, we have a lot of Unix servers from IBM, Sun and HP used here, but PCs and Windows are used as personal workstations throughout the company. This is not going to change any time soon.
You're spot-on with this. People are rarely kind to a network.
I once worked for a Fortune 500 company who put our entire division (only 160 people; we where the smallest in the company by a factor of 10) in its own building way far away from the rest on campus. They signed the lease on the building and began build-out before they realized that the big cemetary and canyon/bridge between us and the Home Office prevented any sort of digging a trough for a fibre run. So they gave us this line-of-site microwave transceiver (dunno what kind, beyond that is was the flaky kind) to put on the roof which would talk with another one on a building that was on campus. The microwave link was supposed to top out at 10mpbs, but I don't think we ever got more than 5-7mpbs due to the long range, fog, birds, whatever.
You think that would be enough for 160 people, right? Not a chance. What most people didn't know was that all the mail servers and windows shares and Unix file/print servers and everything but our desktop machines were on the other side of that link. It made for a real tragedy. And most people were really oblivious as to why this was bad and why you had to be polite to the network. They couldn't grasp that the little blue wire wasn't like the power cord going into a desklamp. I can safely say that the nicer someone's hair, the more likely they meaner they were to our network link. We used to joke that at times we'd probably get better bitrates with two cans and a string, yelling ones and zeroes at each other...
You'd get some half-wit trying to print his 340 page PPT presentation himself in full color (instead of send it to the media center) and mail would slow to a crawl. Mail itself was another excercise in futility. The S&M (that's sales and marketing for the previously mentioned "garage shop" types) folks loved to email big PPT files as attachments to six or eight mailing lists at once. They'd send meeting notes as Word docs, each with graphic headers and footers of the company logo and address, and everyone would have to annotate them. It was almost funny to see them get all confused when people's edits would conflict and the head honcho would have to email out 6 or 8 versions for an eyeball diff. The art department would often print big tif file proofs, in color, rather than look at them on-screen. The web guys were always ftp'ing stuff to the ftp servers, updating web sites stuff, etc. Trying checking in 150MB of source while all this is going on. Now imagine the hilarity of trying to do it when the frog-in-the-blender exe is being re-re-re-remailed to you. I used to save network-related work for lunch or really late in the day when everyone that didn't know what the word "bandwidth" meant was out golfing or getting their hair waxed or whatever it is suits do when it's after 3pm and time to leave work.
The one incident that made it all worth it for me was this one time when a guy came to me asking if I'd burn a CD (I had the only burner) of all ~400MB of his new artwork/media kit/.ppt/.doc stuff so he could drive it over to main campus for some meeting/deadline he had. When I asked why didn't he save his work in a shared folder or something, he said that he tried, but the "network is down and IT says it works so they won't come out and fix it". Turns out that he tried to save his stuff to a share and found it very slow, so tried again and again. And then he tried saving to another shared folder, again and again. Then he tried ftp'ing it three or four times when emailing it to a cohort on main campus was also "taking forever". No matter what he tried, the network was slow, so he figured his only recourse was sneakernetting it over to his meeting or whatever it was he had going on. His copying this file 15-20 times slowed our link to a barely-noticable crawl. My ssh sessions reminded me of way back when I had a 1200 baud modem. I think I was in the middle of a daily build or something, and knew check-in would take 8 hours. So I burned his CD for him and then quit for the day without telling anyone why I was leaving.
I wound up working from home a lot once I got a cable modem.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
> You usually want to build your product for the biggest market first.
Not necessarily. What these folks were building was some fancy-schmancy high-quality sound-studio software. One of the problems with running such stuff on Windows now is that they all come with MS Media Player. When you run any of its components, any "non-approved" sound software simply dies and needs to be re-installed before it can be used again. If you want to be on Media Player's non-hit list, you need to license it to Microsoft. This means that you effectively lose the rights to your software, and Microsoft controls what you can do with it.
I wasn't privy to their talks with MS's licensing people, but I know the result was a minor bout of depression. This had a lot to do with their looking seriously at OSX and Linux. I also got the impression that, after they talked to a few professional sound people, they were even more comfortable with ignoring Windows and going with the other two platforms.
Anyone else have comments to add to this? Maybe it should be a new topic? Maybe it can all get rates flamebait?
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Sunblade is sparc linux, so no wine/vmware.
:( But there is a solaris version, im hoping to get. :)
I would love if everyone used HTML with pdfs for the diagrams, but vendors like to charge you 10K for a cd that only works with thier viewers. (If you pay millions for hardware, whats 10K for a document cd?!)
The java programs seems to built for the windows platform, so it wont run under linux.
Xfree is cool, but I couldnt use my high end gfx cards with sparc linux, had to use the onboard m64s. ICK! SUN wont write linux drivers for some hardware, ya ya, why use linux when you can use Solaris. Have you even Tried Linux on Sparc? Awesome..
I'm Gonna stick with WinXP as my desktop, everything works great, cut&paste, cleartype makes it easy to read, very stable. What funcationality I miss, I just ssh into my unix box (smb mounted file dirs) and it fills the voids in windows. Using the best of both to get my work done. I tried to go Linux fulltime with VMware, but on the slow laptops work gives you, I need every eek of speed I can get. So if Im in VMWARE running windows most of the time, Might as well just use windows, and get back the speed. We have few guys using Vmware over Linux or FreeBSD, but it is slower, and they drop back to Win98se for speed. (I like WinXP over 98)
Maybe if I had a 2ghz, 1 gig ram, GF4 PC, I would be extremely happy. OH wait, we are trying to SAVE money. Damn.