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Reducing the TCO of IT with Linux?
Bil Simser asks: "I've been asked by upper management to look at the feasibility of replacing our current Windows IT infrastructure with Linux. Basically someone has said that Linux is free so now we're off to see how free that really means. A full replacement is probably impossible, but I can see some benefits coming from selective replacement of specific technologies (e.g. application servers, web servers) that might be feasible. This is both from a cost reduction standpoint and increasing productivity when it comes to system management. I've already looked at a few studies done on TCO reduction on this and they look good so now I'm turning to the Slashdot community to see if anyone has either practical experience or informative insight into a problem like this? The objective is to determine the TCO of deploying Linux as a core part of our operational environment so what does that mean in the sense of hardware, software, middleware and management impact?"
I've never been really impressed by studies that claim to produce general numbers on TCO. Things depend very much on what you do and how you do it. Any study you see could be of use to you though, they can help you do your own numbers.
Introduce linux servers when its time to exchange old ones and use linux as a replacement for things where windows dont work that well. A complete overhaul at once is probably going to cost more than its worth. There is no need to toss something that works out the window.
If you replace things as they are too old/broken you dont get the problems that arise when you rip/replace everything. A slow steady pace of replacing should keep the TCO down.
That is unless you want to rip everything out and install an iron_butt of an IBM server. In that case it can save a lot of money but the investment is pretty hefty the first year.
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No most people are plain ignorant.
Stupid people don't know linux.
Using Linux doesn't make you intelligent, smart and sexy either
Teaching Stupid people == Money
It also takes patience and knowledge on your part.
I don't know why people consider themselves to above the rest when they start using linux. Let me tell you its just an OS, get over it. Every person is good at what he/she does. For eg my mom, even after working on a pc for 8 yrs now thinks its her fault when something goes wrong or system hangs. She just plainly hits the reboot button. But at the same time she is very calm and composed on a surgery table even in an emergency. I have seen her being at her best. But not once have I seen her calling others stupid, even if that person has no sense of medicine.
Personally its been over 30 years since people working on computers were considered god. Even my 7 yr old nephew can install a dual boot. And guess what he cannot spell most of the words properly.
I wonder what kind of IT manager you are, expecting us to give you a detailed answer to _such_ a generic question.
:-) Next to that, yes, we are saving a lot on our IT budget by using Linux instead of Windows. But we're just a five-person shop and we all studied informatics, so we don't shy away from tweaking our systems and we don't really care about the system our software runs on.
What does your company do? What kind of software do you run, on servers, on desktops? What hardware setups do you have? What software are your employees used to? How IT-competent are your employees - will they freak out when the "start" button looks different on their desktop, will they call support when Clippy is missing? Is retraining an issue or do you use custom-made software that can be ported to the new environment? Can you estimate the cost of porting your custom-made software?
Etc. etc. etc.
Despite what the marketing people tell us, TCO is always a subjective calculcation, there is _no_ objective way of measuring it. Ask two people in the same company for a TCO calculation and you'll get massively different numbers.
Speaking from my own experience, I can say that using Linux instead of Windows has massively reduced my frustration with server setups and networked clients. A non-frustrated, happy IT manager is good for the company, so that alone should be something to consider.
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the best I can recommend is to start small. Let everyone know that you'll be making some changes. the fisrt step is openoffice/mozilla.
the training for that will be relatively little. go one office at a time; first IT, then accounting, etc.
Use that as a yardstick. gauge the companies relative stupidity/oblivious user.
Mozilla will be easy. it might be as simple as sending a tech traininer to each dept's next meeting and saying "we're upgrading IE, it will look a little different, but it's almost the same.(use the modern skin- people tend to think of it as more of an 'upgraded' look)
next try openoffice. this will be your key. it will require retraining stupid people. This means you taking the time to document it and create a FAQ and a 'how do i...' list.
if they can make it this far with relatively little pain, then try converting a few company servers to linux(webservers are a good start.) then try the IT dept. measure how difficult it is for each person. figure out the basics of exactly how long it takes the fairly tech-saavy people to get it. then take it one office at a time.
start small. baby steps.
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One of the ways in which Linux + free software can help is in the removal of need to count licenses and also do the whole purchase order dance whenver adding a node or an application to an existing node. Not spending time on that stuff can be a cost savings in itself.
>But at the same time she is very calm and composed
:)
>on a surgery table even in an emergency. I have
>seen her being at her best. But not once have I
>seen her calling others stupid, even if that person
>has no sense of medicine.
Oh I dunno
Medical people can see a lot of luserish behaviour in a typical day. It depends on where you work, geriatrics probably isn't so bad, but ER folks see every kind of stupidity you could imagine, and several you couldn't.
There are mailing lists etc. where EMTs and ER people trade stories about the outrageous stupidity of their patients, these lists have the same tone as tech people telling "CDROMs as cupholders" stories.
Ever notice that people who injure themselves because of drugs/alcohol receive a slightly different standard of care at hospitals? You've just used up all your sympathy points, dude!
Good advice to consider the overall timeframe for costs and when savings will be realized.
There are some costs that are harder to measure. Costs of unreliability, people futzing with unfamiliar or non-intuitive software, etc.
I think probably the single largest impediment to Linux adoption currently is not that the applications aren't there, it's training costs to get users up to speed with the alternatives, and it's investment in legacy "standards" - someone's got a pile of old Excel spreadsheets with important information in them.
A lot of people get overly excited at the outset: "Linux is free, reliable, open source and Microsoft charges me every which way to Sunday for stuff with bugs and security holes - no brainer dude!"
Well, training costs and investment in existing systems are real.
If I were you, I'd suggest a small prototype deployment to give you a better handle on how much the training costs will be, since they depend on your users and your mix of applications. Some users and apps will take to Linux like a duck to water, but others will bump up against stumbling blocks that might not have foreseen.
You can win with Linux (my organization is), but it's not a brainless transition.
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If your network is fairly homogenous, the most expensive part will be getting the first couple of machines installed and configured. If you're clever about how you do the first few instances, setting up the rest will be (nearly) trivial. There aren't many cases where you'll find reasons to limit yourself to server-only replacements. Linux is capable as a desktop OS, and is much easier to administer than Windows.
IME, getting servers installed and configured is easy. Getting desktops configured is harder, because the focus software tends to be less robust. Getting Wine and various Windows apps installed; making sure the plugins for the browser(s) are installed and working; setting up the default organization desktop with app icons and such; getting the login authentication mechanism configured properly; making sure network printing works... this is the labor-intensive stuff. Again, once you get everything configured properly for the first machine, you can usually clone the configurations to new installs, so all of the work is up-front.
After that, maintenance is fairly easy if you choose the right distribution. Some are better than others in that respect. Actual sysadmin effort tends to grow logarithmically -- rather than linearly -- with the number of machines being supported (again, if they're homogeneous). Help desk support needs are about the same as for any other OS.
Where you'll find the most savings is in licensing and sysadmin costs. If you have heterogeneous hardware, sysadmin costs can go up, although (again) it is the initial installation and configuration that will hurt the most.
What some of the above posters haven't grasped is that you're being asked for a business case, not a 'Is Linux technically better than MS?' paper.
If you're being judged by business people, you need to speak their language, which all boils down to $CURRENCY_UNITS.
While you may have a template to work off if the upgrade to Win2k or NT was properly planned (and if you don't have it, it might be worth retrospectively doing this), here are the steps you'll need to go through in your business case:
The money bit
Now it gets really interesting. Assuming that you'll be calculating the costs/benefits over a number of years to produce a programme budget and calculating a break-even point some time in the future, you'll need to take into account that you're using money which would otherwise produce a return doing something else, and also that there will be inflation in the mean time.
Talk to your beancounters, and ask them what DCF rate is standard usage in the company - this is the rate by which the company assumes that money will lose its value. If you don't get one, use 10% as a fallback (but make it clear that that's your assumption). With a 10% DCF rate, a dollar will be worth a dollar today, 90 cents next year, 81 the year after, 73 in year 4 and so on - discount factors of 1, 0.9, 0.81, 0.73, 0.66 etc.
For each year, take the net operating savings (ie leaving out the initial project investment) that Linux will bring and multiply that by that year's discount factor. This will be the savings at Net Present Value (NPV - a term all beancounters consider as the real value). Keep a cumulative total.
Divide the cumulative NPV value by the programme cost of the change. This is your Return on Investment (RoI), expressed as a ratio or a percentage. When/if it reaches 1:1, you've hit breakeven. Be very clear about when you expect to hit this point - when it comes will largely determine whether you get the go-ahead.
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Throughout all of these posts, there are always quotes like "...now we don't have to deal with crashing machines all the time...". What in the hell are these people doing to crash their W2K boxes? It's pretty widely known that W2K is *very* stable. My boxes (I know, anecdotal evidence) don't crash. Period. A few very strained web/db servers, a few POS machines, and a few random boxes. No crashes. Ever. What in the hell are all of these people doing to get their W2K boxes to fail? I'm really, really curious.
I agree. It may be "politically correct" to say this on Slashdot, but it's true. The Windows shops I've known (and worked in) have many more servers than correspondingly powerful Unix installations, and each Unix admin was able to ride herd on more servers than a similarly situated Windows admin.
The whole Unix mindset and toolset is incredibly admin-friendly, once you grasp the simple principles.