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Linux/Apache Wins TCO Survey
cant_get_a_good_nick writes "From this week's Apacheweek comes a link to a white paper discussing Total Cost of Ownership for Linux in the Enterprise. Some very good hard numbers here, although as always, YMMV. It shows that even with "expensive UNIX admins" having to switch over costs to a "new UNIX", admin costs are lower than for Windows or Solaris. Some great quotes too, I can see these plastered in posts for weeks to come. I wish they could have included FreeBSD in the survey, but all in all interesting."
fP?
After all, *BSD is dying!
wondering...did anyone else not see this coming?
*waits patiently for over zealous linux fans*
This survey tells us what just about everyone knew - Linux/Apache web servers are by far the most cost effective way to go.
This isn't, however, some wonderful thing for Linux on the desktop. So lets avoid the "see, now there's no reason not to switch to Linux on the desktop" posts, k?
Sixth and final post.
Sure this story confirms what we all knew. Microsoft even admitted it. But this is great ammo and could use better exposure. How many "ask slashdot" stories have we seen with some admin looking for just this sort of ammo to convince his bosses that Linux deployment was worthwile...
On another note, wouldn't it have been nice to see more platforms included? X serve, FreeBSD, SGI, Alpha/Tru64 and Power 4 would have made good additions. Perhaps, if this is not just biased "Linux is the best because we didn't bother including good competitors", we could see some further research on this subject.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0
Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.
Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.
As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
It's perfectly obvious. Windows based systems _still_ don't have the ability to be administered over a simple communications path such as an analogue phone line and a VT100 terminal. This means that if something goes wrong, the sysadmin concerned has to get up and go to the machine itself, which after hours could prove a costly exercise (in both overtime and downtime costs).
There have been so many times I've managed to get a Un*x based system running again in minutes after a problem merely by using a mobile communicator with a VT100 emulator in it. I couldn't do that if it was running on Windows.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
Nothing, and I mean nothing warms the cockles of my heart more than seeing Redmond take it on the chin. RFG however does not seem to understand Solaris and it's operating costs. The $ 12,500.00 "licence" fee quoted in the report covers what? Normally when you purchase a Solaris Server the cost of the server licence is included. Since Solaris 8, Apache has been part of the Solaris OS distribution, there is no software cost associated with Apache. Support contracts under Sun Service while expensive by comparison to x86 software support, also include the costs of on site hardware replacement. As to scalability, attempting normalize capacities based on the per Processor Unit method in the study are misleading. Given the 9.1 GB/sec back plane of the 4800-6800 server line, the number of CPUs required in a horizontally scaled server farm would be many large multiples compared to the Solaris US III implementation. While Solaris admin's generally cost more than MS sys-admins, equating support and admin costs is some what misleading. Comparatively speaking, Soaris admin costs tend to be much lower on account of the stabilitym of the OS, and generally lower number of servers involved in a Sun Solaris installation. Also, as you must know, most of us rarely spend all of our time administering just one OS platform. This makes calculating costs difficult. All in all it is good to see that Open Source code is making it's way in to the enterprise, and is providing much needed copetition to Redmond.
I know it's silly but doesn't Mac OS X get a mention. I think with the release of Mac OS X Server 10.2 it finally there, and you don't need the expensive admin either.