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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.
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;
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!
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
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.