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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.'"
They throw in a few eye catching facts, such as this:
The Windows technicians, however, only managed an average of 10 machines each, while Linux or Solaris admins can generally handle several times that.
Good enough for you?
I think it's more interesting to hear Ballmer acknowledging this too.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The PDF for the study is hosted on IBM's website... I'd be willing to bet that it was IBM that commissioned the study. Anybody know?
;-)
**begin sarcasm**
What a big suprise that would be if a study funded by IBM finds that their Linux solutions perform better than Windows and Sun!
**end sarcasm**
That said, it is nice to have some pro-Linux FUD out there!
Ben
If you could put a price on both sanity and your precious, precious soul, then I'm sure linux would come out ahead even further.
---------------------------
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?
I am assuming that the Linux and Solaris admins are using the CLI to manage the servers via SSH but I believe the slowest way to manage a server is through a keyboard and mouse -- pointing and clicking away. Most of the Windows servers I have managed in my career were through a GUI interface using a remote control program like PC Anywhere and Microsoft's Remote Admin software. With Linux, Solaris and now Mac OS X Server, I use SSH and a keyboard to do my work. With shell scripts and other tricks, I can blaze through server management that I would never be able to do in a GUI environment at the same speed. Even with Mac OS X Server's great GUI management tools, I prefer to fire up Terminal and remotely manage the system through a CLI -- or maybe I just long for the days of my Apple ][.
On the other hand, with the massive numbers of zombied Windows machines probing my networks, it could be that Windows-only Admins are just plain idiots with a MCSE which accounts for the productivity gains of Linux and Solaris admins.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
I read that and thought it was very interesting myself, but they don't give any reasoning for it. The idea that a Linux admin can handle more machines then a Windows admin doesn't wash with me... Maybe the average Windows admin has less system administration experience then the average Linux admin? That could explain the difference I suppose.
No- it's not the other way around. This is exactly what happened w/my company.
We decided that using Linux could help us out w/a couple things that we wanted to do- but we were short on cash to go the MS route.
So I went to Frys Electronics and picked up RedHat. I installed it, learned how to do the stuff we wanted to do, and found out 2 things. Pretty much all the software - and support- you need are available for free.
The community provides so much more than development.
One project we needed was a server running SSH for transfering files over a dedicated T1 between us and a client. You don't need me to tell you that it was cake.
Our other larger project is focused on Apache, PHP and PostgreSQL. There is great, free support out there for all those products.
We bought the box to get started - planned to buy support but dropped those plans when we say that the open source community will provide you with tons of support.
That may not be good enough for some big companies- but for someone in the middle and (always) strapped for cash- it is great.
.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
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.
Last year we decided to migrate off Windows.
We first moved to OpenOffice. Painful, when your clients all use MS Office, but it's possible.
Now we're moving to Mozilla-based browsers.
All our servers (except one) went to Linux in the last year or two.
Now we're killing the last Windows desktops, putting Lindows-OS in their place.
Apart from the license savings, everything just runs better.
There is a huge fear of change, and this works in Windows' favor.
But there is no doubt that open software is better built and cheaper to run.
Changing costs something. But there is no doubt about the TCO of Linux (and its applications) being lower.
Sig for sale or rent. One previous user. Inquire within.
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.
If they want to do TCO of apples to apples, maybe they should have used Sun LX-50 x86 box, instead of their Enterprise class machines. There are feature sets in that class of machine (eg domaining, redundant hardware, hotswap etc) that are just not available in an x86 box. The cost of those features greatly inflates the TCO for Solaris.
"The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding."
At the last place I worked there was one *NIX admin (me) who was responsible for 15 HP-UX machines, a couple of Sun boxen, one lone AIX machine, and about 10 Linux boxen, I was also the webmaster and one of the NT/2K admins. There were 4 dedicated NT/2K admins for about 25 machines and they were always busy working on the machines. If it wasn't exchange dying or the DNS crapping out on us it was some wierd WINS issue or a virus. These guys were very talented admins too, not the MCSE tripe that comes out of the pipe now. Linux TCO is much much lower, I've been preaching this for a long time. I'm not saying that *NIX is perfect or never has a problem, but it is much rarer and the problems are usually easier to fix than the self corruption that goes along with Windows.
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
Not only can Pirates get Windows XP (with a haxxored activation ID) but they can additionally get Office XP for an additional 0 dollars and 0 cents!
Our source was Lee T. Hacksor, a 13 yr-old who claims to have "0wn3d" XP for a little over a year now.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
...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;
I've worked as a Unix and Windows admin at various times. And here's the deal: A company that knows enough about IT issues to seriously consider UNIX probably hires good admins, whether they are Windows admins *or* UNIX admins. The companies that just blindly buy a bunch of Microsoft stuff to slap on the boss's old Dell machine (which is now the "server") probably don't hire good admins. Or, honestly, have any kind of cohesive idea about what they are using their PC's and the network for. Which means they will ALWAYS be dumping money into it to try to make it work, to cover up for their lack of planning. UNIX, on the other hand, isn't even CONSIDERED by shops that aren't pretty fuckin' serious about their network/workstation/applications, and they'll keep costs down, because they aren't screwing around. What I'm saying is, Windows works fine, if it does what you need it to do, and you hire people that know how to do it. But that's rarely the case with Windows shops. And it's almost *always* the case with UNIX shops.
i recently asked my new admin (at a new job) if i could bring in my iBook and use it.
"No. No personal machines on the network."
"Oh, any reason? Other than just policy?"
"Well, they are mostly concerned with viruses and stuff, we can't control your personal computer's virus protection. But its mostly a policy thing."
"Oh, its okay, its an iBook - running Mac OS X."
"There are plenty of viruses out there for the Mac and Linux too, not just windows."
"Really? Name one virus on Mac and the ssh hole doesn't count."
Its been 3 days now. He's started calling me at home late at night, breathing heavy... mumbling something about burning down the building and his stapler...
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
Basically: scripting is everything. If you understand shell scripting and perl, you can make Unix machines dance. A real Unix wizard can nearly bring about world peace from the command line.
Scripting in Windows is much harder. It can be done, but it's relatively alien to the system, and some complex things are unscriptable.
Windows 2000 has improved this capability a lot. If they have been studying for three years, chances are that a lot of the machines are still 4.0. A true from-the-bottom-up 2K network is A LOT easier to administer than 4.0. One poster in the linked thread claims to be running about 200 clients and 37 2K servers all by himself. With 4.0, I don't think that would be possible. Things would break faster than you could fix them. With 2K I can just barely imagine doing it, though I bet that guy is incredibly busy.
Linux is easier still to administer. Perl, ASCII text configuration files, and separation of services beat Kixstart and the registry hands-down.
At UCSD, the Microsoft Assimila... err Microsoft Student Rep essentially crashed our "Linux Setup Day" event a couple years ago and handed out free copies of Windows 2000.
.net, etc. right now on campus.
The MS student rep would give out free copies of Windows, Visual Studio, Office, etc. on campus, and I'm sure that Microsoft is giving out free copies of WinXP, Visual Studio
The thing is that Microsoft did NOT do this sort of thing on such a wide scale until Linux grew in popularity on campus.
MS is obviously trying very hard to keep CS students from learning to seriously develop software outside of a Microsoft Environment.
By providing students with MS software for free, they hope to stop students from using open source development tools.
If Windows is all programmers know, that is all they'll develop for.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Can you...Change passwords with pwd?
Dear God, I hope not.
May we never see th
I was principal architect for Excite Clubs for 4 years. During a period of one year, we went from 100K page views to over 20M page views a day.
,the page generation times went down to .1 seconds and the highest observable CPU load was less than 10%.
We had a rather unique situation. We started the project on Windows NT 4.0 and later migrated to Win2K. During that time, we were barely able to handle 1M page views per day on the windows boxes. In addition, the average page generation time was 2 seconds. The 20 windows boxes we had in production cost approximately 17K a piece (quad compaq proliant with 1 gig of ram) and were all experiencing 80% or more CPU usage.
The 20 boxes were managed by 1 sysadmin (6 years experience from MS consulting services) with a full time assistant. This does not count the high school students we had wandering the racks hard rebooting terminally ill boxes.
Most admin time was spent on upgrades, boxes that would just stop working (we called it spontaneous server rot) and trying to use a host of opaque, inadequate tools to detect and eliminate bottlenecks. Build, rollout and staging tools were also a big time synch. Finally, the installation of software onto a new machine in the right order with all configuration parameters took an extradinary amount of time.
In addition, I had one full time engineer writing noting but 'nanny' programs to monitor the program and restart the process when there were problems.
With all this work, the system still went down daily.
After much politicking we translated the program to JSP (straight page per page translation) and moved to solaris machines. The java middle tier ran as on solaris. The 20 compaq boxes were replaced with 16 solaris boxes. Oddly, we paid almost the same amount per box (20K versus 16K).
Immediately, we were able to more that 5M pageviews per day with no changes to the software. In addition
Our sysadmins were replaced with a part time (less than 5 hours per week) solaris admin. The roll out scritps were trivial to write and maintain. We had very few upgrades/security patches.
Most important, the host of tools provided to monitor system performance and tell exactly where bottle necks were and the truly deep understanding of the system internals by the sys admins allowed us to eliminate the remaining problems and scale to 20M pageviews per day.
That is right. two orders of magnitude better performance for precisely the same code. And and order of magnitude less admin time.
Those were measurable results. Here is my 'opinion' of why the differnces were so dramatic.
I taught Win32 programming and system internals for four years. I was also chief scientist for Redmond Communications who publish a technical journal on Microsoft Software/strategies. So I am not a linux bigot.
My observation has been, that no one truly understands the internals of a windows system. Just as I start to get a handle on the latest caching, memory management, threading issues, there is an 'upgrade' via some patch that changes many of the internals. In addition, as shown by the above threads, most windows sys admins seem to have vastly difference experience and understanding of how to configure and maintain systems.
Unlike most nerds, I will not blame the admin, but blame the system. In the scientific community, windows, in practice, has proven to be somewhat opaque.
Unix, on the other hand, is incredibly well documented and all source is available. Uncertain how inodes are locked and released? No problem, there are many books and references to help you. If worst comes to worst, crack open the damn code.
This has nothing to do with open source, but more to do with the which communities evolved the techonlogy and the underlying motivations of companies hawking their wares.
Note, this is not a good thing, or a bad thing it is only a thing.
There were many people out there criticizing the studies accuracy. I must say I do not have a single colleague that I have spoken with that doubts its varisity from personal experience on BOTH sides of the isle. I just knew that I had to share my own experience with you. My only doubt about the story is that I would say 'order of magnitude' for production servers.
Thank you for your time,
Carmine Mangione
Even though I'm not a heavy scripter my story follows:
I used NT/IIS 4.0 for several years switching to 2000/IIS 5.0 when it was available. I have a small business and primarily use my websites for testing solutions that are implemented for my clients and for e-mail. That being said I had to check my servers daily for hacks and patches and got rooted several times. After switching (sorry Apple) to Linux I've been rooted 1 time (my fault for leaving a known bug open via ftp). Going from checking daily (sometimes 3 to 4 times a day) and still getting hacked, to checking weekly (unless I notice an article here a la openSSL, etc.). My TCO is dramatically less. It has also allowed me to confidently recommend Linux solutions at my full time job.
Time is $$$ and the less I spend trying to avoid script kiddies the more time I have to do real work and get paid.
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
What's funny is they'll post TCO stories from LINUX TODAY, but won't post any from MICROSOFT such as this point-by-point comparison found here. How is it FAIR to link LINUX TODAY, but not MICROSOFT? Ahh... more classic Slashdot bias (notice all of the other OS's get real icons, MS get a borg Bill Gates... very mature)
Basically, the LINUX TODAY article is saying the TCP (Total cost to purchase) is equivalent to TCO (Total cost of ownership)... in effect saying that any positives and negatives Windows may have in the software itself has NO value. As other above have said, you can calculate TCO in many different ways. If you want to assign EVERYTHING other than software licensing a VALUE of $0... maybe this article strikes a chord with you.
All I am saying is consider the source!
Prevent linux based DDOS's!
http://linux.denialofservice.org/
Scripting is close to the true reason linux admin takes less effort.
With linux the admin's education is never limited because everything is open to inspection. With windows the admin's education is limited to what M$ wants them to know. Thus severly handicapping their diagnostic abilities and their intuition.
This effectively reduces the effect of eXPerience for the windows admin. A 5 year windows vet will likely be no smarter than a 3 year vet. However, a 5 year linux vet has every opportunity to exceed his 3 year counterpart.