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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."
"Da ist ein Technölüst in mein Unterpanten!"
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.
-- Under/Overrated is meta-moderation, and therefore is Redundant.
Now their computers are made of pressed particle-board.
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.
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
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.
Verizon saved $6 million in equipment costs by switching its programmers from UNIX and Windows workstations to Linux workstations running OpenOffice.
I'm surprised they didn't just fire all the programmers, to save the maximum amount of cash.
--saint
(bitter ex-Verizon employee.)
"Can you hear me now? GOOD!"
www.eFax.com are spammers
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.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
>
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.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
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.
The next Cmdr Taco duplicate will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
>> 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.
Translation:
We were dumb and wrote endian-dependent code, such as accessing multi-byte numbers by loading one character at a time. We assumed the high-order bytes were first, but with the Intel processor, it's the other way around. So we had to go back and re-do it all over again. Don't worry, we'll find some way to blame management. They told us to write endian-dependent code; yeah, that's right.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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 $22,000 workstation will probably last 6 or 7 years. Not so with that cheap PC.
I had one developer who was still using his SPARCstation 10 until less than a month ago when we replaced it with a spare Ultra 2. Why? Because it still worked. All he used it for was basically an X display via SSH into the development boxes....
Would the Dell-of-the-week from 1991 still be useful today? Somehow I doubt it.
You get what you pay for. And sometimes, not even that.
--NBVB
Theres alot of operational software that is "Windows" only, even if the back end servers are unix based. I work for a wireless telco, so I will list all my software I use on a daily basis.
1. M$ 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...
Verizon refused to set me up with their DSL service when they found out that one of my computers was running Linux. They told me it wouldn't work. Even after I said I would hook the DSL up to my win2k box.
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
Are you sure it's their programmers? I just read a big writeup on how they saved tons of money on servers since they've upraded to the .NET platform.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
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.
I'm starting to think that I really haven't been living in the Real World, but it sure feels real. This must be that Matrix everyone's talking about.
Sometimes I think of how things could have gone differently if I hadn't come here, and I wonder if I should have taken a different path. It hasn't always been easy, and the pay is ... eh. Then I read about what corporate guys have to go through, and my former thoughts about "it hasn't always been easy" seem so petty.
Maybe I'll change my mind if I ever grow up. That'll be the day!
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I don't think I'd have any problem on a 286. Just as long as I'm paid for compile time...
It's been a long time.
> 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.
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%
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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.
Every document can and should be saved in a standard
non-proprietary format that everyone can read.
And HOW exactly is HTML a "non-standard proprietary format?" I believe it's pretty well documented on w3c.org.
Jeez, this guy's a moron, all he needs to do is add a line such as
text/html; lynx -dump %s ; copiousoutput; nametemplate=%s.html
to his mailcap file and you can use lynx to read html mail. No reason for all the file-format hate, man.
Aw, fuck it. Let's go bowling. - The Big Lebowski