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Linux TCO: Less Than Half The Cost of Windows
ggruschow writes "Linux Today reports 'The cost of running Linux is roughly 40% that of Microsoft Windows, and only 14% that of Sun Microsystem's Solaris, according to a new study which examined the actual costs of running various operating systems over three years.'"
I think it's more interesting to hear Ballmer acknowledging this too.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
So the majority of the costs are based on the server admin's cost, which averages $71,xxx a year...my question is, where are this jobs as linux admins for $71k/ year?
An employee's gross pay is typically less than half of what it costs to employ him or her. An employer needs to buy office space, power, lighting, air circulation, health benefits, not to mention the employer's share of the taxes (in the USA, payroll tax and Social Insecurity matching payments).
Will I retire or break 10K?
Totally. I am an "admin" who "manages" about 150 Windows systems these days. Of course, I'm supported by other teams of "non-admins", so even that figure doesn't clearly indicate the Windows TCO.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
There's an interesting book at http://www.winface.com that looks at how to re-orient a whole IT department from Windows to Unix/Linux. It's mainly about using Unix, but Linux gives the same advantages, only even more so due to improved compatibility across Linuxes compared to the various Unixes, and much lower licensing costs, lower hardware costs for Intel deployments and so on. The book has some annoying errors in places, but the guts of it are very useful for costing out complete deployments of Windows vs. Unix, for small through medium to enterprise scales.
You can download some parts of the book for free to get a flavour of what it's about. I actually bought a copy and would recommend it for anyone thinking about converting from Windows to Linux - it's only $30.
A webserver is a webserver is a webserver. If it spits out HTML, that's all that really matters. There's no room for feature difference as a web server does pretty much one thing... spit out HTML over TCP/IP
Start getting into application servers, that's another story, but really, there's nothing you can do on Windows/IIS/Activex that cannot be done on Solaris/Iplanet/Java including (Centralized Authentication, Database Access, Server Side Dynamic Code, Client Side Dynamic Code, etc.)
Only difference is it costs 1 admin to maintain 10 NT/IIS webservers and 1 admin to maintain 30 Solaris Servers. Now add scaling onto that where one Solaris Server can hold 2 or 3 times as many processes/applications than an NT box. Also add that it is cheaper to reach 3/4/or even 5 9's with Solaris/Iplanet, and you get these Total Cost of Ownerships.
Finally, I haven't read the artical yet, but am very familiar with webhosting issues, it is imperative to compare level of support. If you are looking for 99% uptime, I bet the numbers between OS's are very similar, and probably Solaris and even Linux looks expensive. However, aim for 99.999% uptime, and you will realize that NT/IIS just isn't capable of reaching that level. To reach 5 9's you almost have to go with a real Unix on real (non-intel) hardware.
To reach 5 9's on an NT environment, you will end up spending between 2 and 10 times more than with Solaris. (That's because after fighting with NT(4.0 and 5.0) for a year, you'll eventually sell the hardware and licenses and build a Solaris environment)
This isn't the sig you are looking for... Carry on...
Meanwhile, here on /., people seem to be saying that the report came from Linux Today, and therefore is too biased to be trusted.
So on the one hand, you're wrong about the source of the report, just like a lot of other posters. On the other hand, you're wrong about /.'s response to the report.
But hey, at least things are somewhat better than you expected, which is always pleasant.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
...it is simply the fact that Windows systems just generally take more time and effort to secure. Whether it is simply because there are more patches, or that those patches just take forever to install, or that those patches create further problems that have to be addressed, I can firmly say in my 6 or 7 years of administration, the few Windows boxes I've had to manage have been a far larger administration headache than any of the Linux, FreeBSD, or even Solaris machines.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
If you blog it...
Are they built into the OS or do you have to purchase them or download them after the fact?
While true you sometimes have to buy or download these tools, this doesn't mean that you can't use em. It's been a while since I messed with this stuff, but when I worked in Nix/NT operations I remember some of the command line stuff on NT and in the reskit was ok. Also there's some great stuff out there like Roth's Admin Misc perl modules which are just great (see http://www.roth.net/perl/adminmisc/)
By giving it away free, they've reduced the cost of running Windows by a lot.
Umm... maybe this is true for you. But let's face it, MS only ever gives away product as a prelude to 2 events: 1) bundling the product into the OS or Office 2) increasing market share via free product then charging that newly gained market share on the next go-around.
Do you honestly think you're going to get Windows for free once you're in the public work force?
On the plus side, Windows has become MUCH to operate in server environments and even on the desktop but, if the study is to be believed, it still has some room for improvement.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
Red Hat 77
Microsoft 70
FreeBSD 25
Sun 6
Novell 4
The analog in Windows would be... VNC, ???, and batch files?
.NET server is XML based and your scripting job just got a whole lot easier. Plus, you'll be able to script in Perl or C# as opposed to VBScript. I know that'd save me tons of headache!
Try Terminal Services and Windows Scripting Host. I am not a Windows SysAdmin, but I know many. The last company I worked for had one SysAdmin for about 50 Win2K desktops, ~12 Windows servers, 1 Linux box, and two unix-based network storage devices. The servers were all offsite aside from a couple of test machines. Using Terminal Services he could easily bring up the remote machines to configure them. Using WSH, he scripted IIS config's, user management, Exchange configs, etc. To add a new web site to IIS or to create a new user one doesn't even need a GUI. I'll be the first to admit that MS should not have GUI's on it's enterprise servers, but it's also not required. Everything can be done at the CLI and script level. This is where your true efficiency is. Now add the fact that almost every configuration in Windows
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
You know, you don't have to subscribe to software assurance. If you (as a company) prefer, you can just pay the one-time license fee per computer. You only run into SA if you take Microsoft up on one of their volume licensing plans.
Lots of people complain about the new licensing. But let's not forget that nobody's got a gun to your head. If you want, you can just pay full price for every computer in your company and be done with Microsoft forever.
Here at the University of Idaho, we have about 750 public NT4 client machines managed by about 5 part-time administrators (who also happen to be students). Every workstation has a complete suite of over 200 applications installed.
The OS is installed and configured automagically via scripts, and each machine can be completely reformatted/reinstalled by pressing "N" as it reboots.
The back-end is NetWare, with ZEN for application distribution. So no, it's not all Windows, primarily because the university has been pretty much in bed with NetWare for the last 10-15 years.
So when you say that "complex things are unscriptable," that leads me to believe that you have no clue what you're talking about. How is it that editing text configuration files is so much easier than editing text registry patches?
And no, this isn't a "Windows is better!" debate. I just think that if you have people running your systems who aren't morons or zealots, you can make just about anything work well.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Looking at the hardware costs for Solaris, they mention the "most common servers in use were the Sunfire 4800 and 6800". This doesn't sound accurate and I'll explain why.
Both of these servers are enterprise-class machines usually designed for high-availability, processing-intensive applications, such as databases. Very few sites would use such big iron to run webservers on. For webservers, most companies would use lower-end hardware, such as the Sunfire 280r or the Ultra Enterprise 420r. At a former dotcom I worked at, we had about 400 third-party E450s and 600 Ultra 10s, which were used both in production and development, and were handling an average of 12 million connections every day. We had 8 Ultra Enterprise 6000s (the precursor to the 6500 and 6800) which were exclusively for databases.
In addition to this overkill in hardware costs, the report is also incorrect in the licensing costs. They mention the vast majority of customers used 8-CPU systems (very strange; the 4800 can hold 12 CPUs and the 6800 up to 24; it'd only be sensible to max out the boxes to offer better performance), which makes the licensing costs claim dubious at best. The cost of a Solaris RTU (Right To Use)license upgrade for a 5-8 CPU box is $6,000.00, not $12,500.00, as listed in the Sun Store.
So, either the report's data is slightly askewed, or they picked the wrong companies to use as models for this study.
Just my two cents...
"We'll need 2000 crickets, 4 cans of Easy Cheese, and the fluid from 18 glowsticks for this plan to work...." - ph0n1c
Qhat a surprise, their figures are based on totally bogus reasoning.
They equate single and dual-CPU commodity x86 boxes with 24-CPU US3 servers with 100% redundancy for guaranteed uptime.
No wonder their figures are utterly bogus.
If you take their own calculations, factor in COMPARABLE figures across all 3 platofrms, then you get Windows as the most expensive, Linux second and Solaris woith the lowest TCO.
But then, that would not have made for a good story, would it...
People should not be afraid of their governments - Governments should be afraid of their people.