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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.
The problem in this situation may be the perception that open source is free.
This means that it is easy for people upstairs to asssume that there will be correspingly less budget for training/ migration, dooming it to failure.
OSS may not be free as in beer, but at least its not like secondhand beer.
Migrating to a different OS costs money, whether from an expensive one to a cheaper one, or from one expensive to another. When you make the calculations, make sure to include a calculation of when the migration will start to pay off.
Setting up multiple alternatives might also be a possibility. Set up a matrix, and figure out how much effort goes into the various boxes that could be migrated - and at what risks.
If you have a simple IIS web server serving static, migrating to Linux will most likely be rather painless. Replacing a file server likewise (unless it is running XP - I'm not soo sure about that one).
It is extremely hard to give any more specific advice than this - since you aren't very specific yourself. How much business logic is tied up in Microsoft products - and how much can easily be replaced by open or java-based alternatives?
Stop the brainwash
Oh Bull. In my experience, stupid people are just as stupid and time consuming on Windows as on any other platform. Just a thought.
Also, before all the fanboys out there start screaming "Linux is better", consider this: the reason Windows server software is present at most companies is not because of IIS nor because it offers a secure server environment. It is because of Exchange. Although it has MANY shortcomings, it works, and even though it is perfectly feasible to use open protocols to accomplish most of what Exchange does, you will not have a clear upgrade path (something that is important to upper management, however irrelevant it might be in real life) and you will have to go through hell to do the transition.
Basically, my opinion is the following: move your file servers, proxy servers and print servers to Linux. It should be fairly straightforward if you plan it well, or have a decent project manager. Leave Exchange for last and research the subject very well.
Or post another Ask Slashdot :-D
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
TCO hails back to the days when DOS imposed 7.3 naming scheme for files. Thus, as an amusing jape, destined to make GNU/Hippies wet their pants, Rob 'Fudge Packer' Malda chose the name CmdrTCO, shortened these days to TCO. It represents many horrific things, including TCO-snotting, which actually refers to the queer GNU/Hippy practice of blowing windows CDs out their noses onto each others spotty, pasty white, lardy bodies.
TCO = Total Cost of Ownership
Purchasing prices + the costs of system management.
please proff read !
There's a linux-service company called kangaroot which offers free auditing about linux-migration.
I don't know about the quality of the audit, but you can always try it?
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.
HTTP/1.1 400
IBM adressed similar problems to one of the biggest companies in austria
Yeah in fact, you're true. But I think your conclusion (== Money) is little bit to fast.
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Changing a whole IT infrastructure from Windows to Linux is not simple, as any other migration, but ther can be a TCO reduction I think. Though it won't be fast, it's a long term saving and the visible money saving may come up only after a few years I think. When you realize that there isn't anymore licence upgrading.
Another important thing that I would like to add, is that you will need a lot human resources and knowledge, at least for the start.
Hope I could help and keep me up to date about the evolution, 'cause I'm also planning a similar migration.
Best Regards
NeoEinstein
n-e
"RMS is the Jerry Springer of Open Source Software" --AC
Yes, and Bill Gates and co. comes in as guests making complete asses of themselves every show.
=D
HTTP/1.1 400
The New York Linux Scene has held business demos regarding Linux for business, TCO, desktop applications, Databases and more. There are audios available for download at the web site that include presentations made at the CUNY Graduate Center in NYC, and more recently at CUNY/LaGuardia in Queens, NYC.
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.
Without that information it is impossible to even try to guess the TCO. You should describe your environment, human resources and everything else in quite much detail to have beneficial input. As you might have read from some TCO reports, replacing things with Linux might have anything between a negative and very postive TCO impact. Anyway, I would suggest first trying with a dedicated group of individuals - then if it works, enlarge to one division (if your company has divisions). Take smaller steps. Or... do you already have results from tries like this?
If you will try to find the closest thing to what you have, you most likely will end with more headache than if you just list all the necessary functions and install whatever does them best.
Say, you have email. There is Exchange equivalent for Linux (Samsung Contact), but if one can survive with moving meeting scheduling functionality to something else (or abandoning it -- people should not spend so much time at meetings that they need to mess with each other calendars to schedule it), Cyrus + sendmail with IMAP will outperform everything else UNLESS people like to send multi-megabyte attachments to giant lists instead of placing files on some HTTP server.
Meeting scheduler and web server management programs can be installed separately (and nothing wrong will happen even if large attachment will get copied to 100 people, as long as it fits on the server's hard drive), but people should be aware that they are there. On the other hand, performance, security and flexibility of Internet connection will improve dramatically compared to Exchange.
Same kind of "similat to what you had on Windows" vs. "what performs this function the best" dilemma exists for pretty much every other service.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Without knowing what application servers you're looking to replace it's abit hard to say anything.
The general network infrastructure bits, file servers, mail servers (note: MAIL not the overblown nightmare known as Exchange), firewalls, dhcp servers, gateways, some router boxes then Linux will be of benifit.
The one cost factor that is hard to calculate is the cost of retraining the IT support team - do you know how many already use linux at home or have used it in the past?
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
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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Linux is like my wife, hard to understand but very nice once you get under the hood.
"Free and open? Cheap Total Cost of Ownership? Do thousands of geeks look at the internals every day?"
No that was my x girlfriend.
This one is all mine and the TCO is pretty nice, she works with computers. As of looking at her she is a geek, nuff said.
HTTP/1.1 400
Since you give no information on what you do with your NT infrastucture it's hard to say. But as far as I have expierienced, using Linux won't be considerably cheaper if you don't switch entirely.
The heterogenic fuss of administrating an NT/Linux mix of 500+ PCs is a pure pain in the but. And knowing how crappy NT 'networks' are, I suggest you ditch it entirely.
I guess you are considering a network wide update anyway, so total Linux could very much be the way to go. Alltough you'd probaly have to start with "let's just change the servers and one or two Desktops" to get the people used to the Idea.
And finally, to answer your question:
A Linux only enviroment for Standard PC work will allways be cheaper than WinNT. Provided you know your way about Linux admining and there's no special software that only runs on NT. Which would only be something like special Video NLE software or something simular.
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I've read a few things on the web about the topic. It seems to me that if you are involved with a small to mid sized business, there could be some decent savings on licensing fees etc. Also lots of people site support as being the great thing about windows products, well, if you actually look into it, it costs a heck of a lot for getting that support off microsoft each year. BUT, it's like what others have said, it depends a lot on just how much stuff can be painlessly transferred across to linux whilst maintaining the functionality and ease of use that is required.
so what does that mean in the sense of hardware, software, middleware and management impact?
OK, you have not actually told us what groupware your company runs (Lotus should be okay as IBM has worked upon it, for Exchange, you may take a look to Xandros).
Also, What typical activities are you performing ?
Programming ?
For which target ?
If this "just" consists of deploying yet-another-billing system, I guess it is still possible if you know how to interface the telecom switches using the GCC...
Now, for DTP purposes, you'll have a problem as Gimp doesn't support CYMK (well, it didn't the last time as checked) and Gyve or Killustrator are just too far from Adobe's products.
For web programming, this could do, except that I am not sure there is a GNU package aimed at replacing FlashMX... OK, still get Java, though.
No, please, be more explicit regarding what is to be done using Linux.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
Oh man, are you saying I have to get a better pick up line at a bar then, "Hey baby, I use Red Hat, what's your distro?"
Sincere Choice
Open Source Initiative
Why Free Software's Long Run TCO must be lower
Open Source is good for America - US military advised (This is about the military, but parts can also apply to business. Read the report linked at the end of that article.)
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but this is more for diskless workstations.
It would apply since your hardware can be used diskless even if it has a disk, but the various types of apps had to be changed and a server (under bigger load in an terminal server conviguration) had to handle things.
But as far as wholesale windows replacement, this would be a good resource.
And guess what he cannot spell most of the words properly.
:-)
I think I've read some of his posts on Slashdot
Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
on exactly which applications and servers you want to use. I think we need some more info here.
Ciryon
TCO = "Totally Cool OperatingSystem"
The lower the TCO the less cool something is. When Microsoft says that Windows has a higher TCO then Linux they mean that Windows is cooler.
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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I don't know but in my opinion a feasability and TCO study would definetely have to be based on the individual components of your infrastructure. Sadly this article doesn't say anything about what kind of solutions would have to be supported/replaced. Without that kind of information you simply can't do any cost analysis. You cannot just say that TCO with any specific system (even Linux) is going to be lower/higher *without* knowing the facts about the infrastructure.
All that I CAN say based on recent experience is that a Linux server solution tends to be more stable, thereby saving costs in comparison to Windows servers with respect to reliability. Base installation costs for our shop has been equal to Windows, by the way, because it took our people more time to get things running in the first place. But that's only *our* experience.
Again: without knowing the facts you cannot get meaningful conclusions for your specific situation.
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.
although it doesn't eliminate them as the word "free" might suggest. However the costs get heavily reduced.
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At my current job they made the same decision time ago; we now run all remote customers stations, all local developing stations, all network management machines and nearly all servers under Linux. The only server we're still forced to run under Windows is the IIS/SQLServer one, but the port towards Apache/MySQL (or PostgreSQL - our network is rapidly growing) is already scheduled to start next year.
The amount of money saved by using free software is enormous. No license fees per machine (A Windows + Office license saved for each machine does matter a lot when there are hundreds->thousands installs!), fast bug corrections, free and easy remote administration (desktop included), no time and bandwidth costs due to viruses or trojans (or windows
As other posters wrote, it may take some time and money to retrain the personnel to use Linux; that's true, but is definitely worth the effort. A mid-skilled sysadmin could also easily configure a basic window/desktop manager to be easier and safer to the user than Windows.
YMMV of course, but in our case Linux was the best choice ever.
At the beginning of 2001, we changed all development servers (with our testing Oracle 8i databases), and everything went sweet. So in april 2001 we changed our production server from a Sun Enterprise 5000 (4 Ultra Sparc processors) to a Quad Xeon. No more server crashes, no more high maintenance costs.
Some interesting facts:
The topic didn't say anything about the OS they're currently using -- for all we know, they could be running a commercial UNIX right now, in which case their existing staff will be much less lost (and their existing internal software will port semi-easily, and they won't be using Exchange in the first place, and the whole thing will otherwise be much easier).
I've overseen a transition from SCO to Linux, and other than the porting of one crufty old internal app with a bunch of platform-specific dependancies, it went quite smoothly.
'If I stand on a hill in a storm with copper armour and a sword held up at arms length shouting "All the gods are bastards", will I get hit by lightning?'
(With apologies to PTerry)
Seriously - lets not retread the same old stuff on Slashdot that most of us could write code to generate the resulting opinions and flamewares (Linux vs M$ / P2P vs RIAA / SCSI vs IDE / MAC vs PC)
The best discusions I've seen here are where we get a good spread of opion, those are interesting and challenging.
Oh wait, I forgot where I was...
Lots of annoying popups there, sorry about that.
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We're avoiding Linux like the plague. Why? Do you have any idea how hard it is to find Linux sysadmins? And if you do find them, do you have any idea the sort of salary they're likely to ask?
In my opinion in the long run, the TCO of Linux fall higher than Microsoft. But this is just my opinion. I have no hard numbers and no, I'm not a Microsoft plant.
Yuioup
At my company, we am doing the same.
We are in a Win2000 Active Directory environment, and we are slowly replacing the file servers with samba server (which are really easy to join to a win2k AD domain, and use the AD authentication if you RTFM), moving the web servers to Apache, the firewall is now a linux box with iptables, snort/acid and 2 network cards, and so on.
The whole linux section is running webmin over SSL, so changes in configuration are easy to administer and make can be done even by the microserfs in our company.
The only struggling point is Exchange (as another post mentions), there we go into the realm of broken LDAP implementations in AD and X400 connectors, so we have decided to leave that alone for now (to be honest, exchange 2000 performs quite adequately) (hiss! boo!)
We did not do the 'sudden switch', we just made sure there was a *nix alternative the moment another winbox went belly-up. The users don't even realise something is different, and the new structure performs well.
I find TCO a vague concept; there are so many intangible factors involved. I do know that
a)we are rid of MS's expensive server licenses
b)we spend less time troubleshooting
c)the hardware requirements are significantly lower
Plus, I get to play with *nix boxes all day long! yay!
-- No Sig is a Good Sig
There seems to be a general smattering of questions around how vague my Ask Slashdot submission was. Let me clarify by saying that I'm not looking for anyone to do the cost analysis for me, or even tell me what it would be. Obviously the numbers are based on what components we have or what software we're tied to. That's a complexity of it's own. And whatever technical challenges there are need to be raised as flags, but at a conceptual investigation stage nobody needs to know those details to get a 50,000 foot view of the world. What I am looking for is really the best way to determine these costs and if anyone has some experience in doing such a move from one platform to another and what are some of the "gotchas" to look out for when doing this type of study.
True, a system where users are only engaging email against an Exchange server means pretty much nothing in terms of swapping out Windows with Linux and serving up POP3, but even in that simple environment there are costs associated with support, maintenenace, upgrades, etc. If it costs $40 million dollars to replace a Microsoft technology with a Linux technology over 10 number of years, I'd rather stick with Microsquishy where the support is there and pay the $3 million/yr for it (or whatever those numbers are).
I think one of the key points that we're seeing from looking at this problem is the fact that we're seemingly tied to certain products, not necessarily the technologies. So depending on the product rather than the service is causing a lot of grief in any kind of cost reduction. One comment that stood out was that large corporations were tied to Windows not because of IIS but because of Exchange. This is only partially true as most large corporations are tied to a series of products rather than technologies. It's not as simple as Exchange vs POP3 but more like BizTalk vs ???, portal technologies, SAP, etc. There is no one single solution in a corporate environment for all services.
Thanks!
quite an insightful comment, I wonder why it wasnt modded up! ;-)
But people wont demand something, unless they know that it will really effect them. Most of the managerial staff will not realize that the core infrastucture beneath the win boxes is OSS.
Unless they are educated of course. But you have to realize that intial costs of migration will be high. There will be glitches, crashes and what not. People will be realy put off and you will be called a bad sys-admin. It may take about 4-5 months of low productivity, can you sustain that. After that things will be stable and good, and soon people will realize that the ice-cream tastes better than the cake, which was stale anyways
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See www.winface.com for a book some ideas from the Unix world on TCO of Unix vs. Windows. Most of the arguments and calculations will work, and the TCO will be lower because you are likely to use x86 hardware with Linux, giving similar hardware costs to Windows.
There are some annoying errors in this book, but it is worth the $35 - I got a copy and it is quite thought provoking.
Most windows printing drivers (e.g. from lexmark) can use an "lpr" network port. So you don't need to use samba for printing.
A lot hangs on this point. If you mean `it pounds perfectly good server hardware into the sand' then I agree, although I'm not sure why this would be an advantage.
If you want to do that, just use the latest version of LookOut and point it at your LDAP server. It'll send no end of insane LDAP queries and keep the poor server shuddering and smoking up the tyres almost as if it were running Exchange.
If by `it works' you mean `it reliably delivers email', I'd have to violently disagree. I've just received a bounce from an Exchange server... a week after I sent it the original email. Sometimes it delivers OK, sometimes it mangles attachments, sometimes it just toys with a message for a few hours for no reason that I can detect.
PostFix does all of the _useful_ email things that Exchange does and requires only a fraction of the horsepower. Do we need to discuss security? The few obscure/bizarre things the SendMail will do that PostFix won't are rarely worth the bother of a crash-dump configuration file.
The only nearly-unique feature of Exchange is the collaboration aspect, and even that is much better done with SamsungContact nee hp-OpenMail.
And as another poster asked, why meet so often? And do people need to tinker with each others' calendars to achieve this? You may be looking at a procedural bug here.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
>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!
I'm sitting here looking at a perfectly good alphaserver vintage 1994 that no one at work had any use for and hence I've inherited.
We use some BSD to squeeze a little more life out of a few aging x86 boxes for mail, etc. but to the best of my knowledge, nothing really touches linux when it comes to a.) hardware compatibility coupled with b.) application support and c.) a snowball's chance in hell of getting a support contract that will keep your TCO south of the prison rape that is MS licensing. But then, I'm the small fish...
In any event, if you have a mixed platform environment and a few older systems the capacity to leverage that hardware's remaining capabilities given a homogenous OS environemnt, open standards and fine-grained configurability creates the potential (in my mind) for a very excellent short term return on investment.
Furthermore, its a relatively low risk scenario for you and other management members to get good, hard fact data about what the realities of the differences in TCO is using linux in _Your Environment_ .
Slashdot is the best TCO reduction device! Linux/Windows or any other OS comes nowhere near Slashdots amazing ability to reduce companies TCO. If your company have any IT-related problem just post it on /. and you will reveive bundles of free research and support!
/Patrix
Cheers
I've been failing at convincing my company to even look at any non-Microsoft software, let alone Linux. I've shown the TCO analyses that I've found online, all of them already posted by others. I even did my own analysis specific to my company in a long paper. I also re-wrote one of our applications on a linux app server just to prove my points. All with no success. There are too few very specific reports online of corporate experience in migration to Linux and the actual cost savings achieved. So whatever the results, good or bad or mediocre, please do the community a favor and post as many details as possible online. You'll be helping people like me who are trying to convert the ignorant. It will be much appreciated.
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The rider is that you have to find roughly 3-4x as many Windows admins, and that in itself demands more managing than 1/3-1/4 as many Linux admins.
Let's put it this way: shop with 25 assorted servers has a choice of six Windows admins at (say) AUD$80,000 PA apiece or two Linux admins at (say) AUD$120,000 PA apiece. Quick! AUD$480,000 or AUD$240,000 PA for the same services, you choose!
Now let's turn to databases and email. Say that this shop has 5 of each and fifty seats on each, that's 250 licences for each, at a combined total of roughly AUD$300 a seat for MS-SQL plus Exchange, or AUD$750,000 (or a free Linux admin for six years riding PostgreSQL plus PostFix). It's enough to make an accountant go, er, postal.
Maybe you're not a Microsoft plant, maybe you're a Microsoft animal? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
My god, I know I'm not the first to notice, but how is it that the same topics keep coming up over and over ? Why not just put up a sort of FAQ, where a generic post like this one is put up, and comments are perpetually allowed ?
How often is it "news" when Slashdot runs a post OVER AND OVER wherein everyone trumpets the lower TCO of Linux, or the myriad issues you need to consider, etc ?
`there are probably enough MCSE paper tigers to get some affordable, albeit dubious, maintenance and support'
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Standard disclaimers apply
The comments below are offered in the hope that they will be of some use to the original poster and are not intended to offend anyone.
The opinions expressed herein are those of the author and do not reflect the opinions of the author's employer or any organization(s) the author may be affiliated with.
The TCO of replacing Windows with Linux will depend on the following factors:
1. size of your organization
2. complexity of your organization
3. your budget
4. your hardware (including your network hardware)
5. your software
6. your human resources (minus your IT people)
7. your IT people
If you have a small or medium sized organization with a good IT dept., Linux compatible hardware, flexible management, employees willing to accept something that looks and works a little differently and you are not running any strange / proprietary software which does not have an open source or Linux equivalent then you could migrate your whole organization with the assistance of 1 Linux/Hardware geek.
If that is the case you could migrate everything for the cost of 1 full time geek (30-120K/yr).
If you have a very large+complex organization, in order to achieve the best possible TCO you would need:
1. at least 1 Linux Guru/Master Geek (60-200K)
2. at least 1 Hardware Master Geek (60-200K)
3. at least 1 Linux Slave / Hardcore Geek (30-80K)
4. at least 1 Hardware Slave / hardcore geek (30-80K)
5. a budget sufficiently large enough to pay for the migration costs (an incremental rollout would cost more)
6. a small development team to code new apps and or drivers if you cannot find suitable replacements for what you currently have (1 to 5 people at 30-80K a piece)
If you migrate everything overnight that will have the lowest possible TCO.
If you migrate gradually you will end up paying more over time but that would allow your people more time to adjust thus reducing the human resources problems/issues.
If you have a small budget and you are not authorized to kill the patient in order to save it then your only option might be to migrate a small number of machines at a time and retrain your people as you go whenever necessary.
The best time to upgrade your OS would be if you are about to purchase new machines anyway you could then replace the old machine with the new machines incrementally fixing problems as you go.
In general Linux is awesome when used as a:
1. file and print server
2. public web server
3. intranet/private web server
3. firewall
4. router
5. mail server
6. database server
7. DNS server
8. network management workstation / server
9. authentication server
This is by no means an exhaustive list.
I can say no more without knowing more about your organization.
If you can provide more details about your organization without divulging the identity of that organization please do so. I am sure there are many slashdot.org members out there that could provide you with a lot more information if they knew more about your systems and your internal structures.
You might want to consider contracting an independent third party with good Linux and Windows knowledge to come in and inspect your organization and give you a guesstimate of what it will take to migrate.
Live long and prosper iII II
Unix_Geek_65535
Hear hear. You're Mum works on system a million times more complex, that comes with no manual.
I am always telling this to people - if it breaks, how is it your fault? If the wheels fall off your car, do you assume it's the way you hold the wheel?
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.
... and we have found that overall, it was a good experience.
We found that with our business(high volume, low margin) that the new licensing from MS would cost us several thousand dollars every few years, not counting the initial cost to get everything we already had in house "current".
Also, the cost of the hardware to run Server 2000 supporting all of our functions was also cost prohibitive as we would have needed to replace our aging HP Netserver LH3.
In the end we wound up replacing the Netserver LH3 with a pair of Linux servers. One running SAMBA, the other sendmail/POP3.
Overall, the cost of our server hardware was roughly 1/2 of what we would have paid otherwise. Cost of OS, $0. Cost of time and training to come up to speed and trouble shoot all of the ins and outs: 12 weeks @ 20hrs a week of my life (insert appropriate salary here).
Miscellaneous savings: No more weekly reboots (though we still do a monthly to insure everything is still peachy), we have confidence in the stability of our server OS.
Nothing is obfuscated, we can look at anything under the hood that we want to and modify it for our business needs.
Wealth of knowledge: Every error that I encountered along the way was solvable by doing a simple search on the Web.
Expertise: In order to accomplish this task, especially performed by only one or two individuals in your IT department, you will need to cultivate in house expertise. It will not be such that all questions will be answered as if by an Oracle, or even a Guru, but it certainly will but them on par with many of the people running around with their MS certifications.
Downfall: This was not an easy task to just "do". All of our IT folks in shop (myself included) are UNIX systems administrators, at least in the basic sense, and it still took a fair amount of time to untangle all the bugs.
I could not have imagined being told "We need that new server up in 2 weeks." and just doing it. Now I could bring said server up in 4-8 hours from scratch, but in the beginning it was a lot of trial and error.
-- You don't shoot to kill, you shoot to stay alive.
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.
The only thing you can accurately describe as "Scotch" is a sticky tape made by 3M. And it's
There's two ways to adopt new technology: you can throw away everything you have and move to new technology in a revolutionary fashion. This is highly disruptive to an organization. Excessive training cost, numerous problems, etc. are more than likely. In short, you don't want revolutions in your IT infrastructure. The second option is to evolve your system. Replace things that would otherwise require new investments in licenses, things that you are not happy with etc.
If your exchange server is working fine, don't replace it unless you would otherwise upgrade to a new version. If your IIS webserver is adequate for serving the handful of word documents in your organization, don't fix it unless you need certain functionality offered by apache. Linux has a lower TCO for stuff like filesharing and printersharing. However, you have already invested in your existing infrastructure and if its working fine there's no reason to make additional investments in a functional equivalent.
Jilles
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.
Why not have the CIO himself/herself post here with a job offer instead? After all, if the poster is so lame that they haven't heard / don't know where to look for any of this info, they shouldn't be in charge of any sort of project to assess the technology in question, etc....
There has been mixed success so far..
The good...
- Significant drop in costs.
- Users are able to do their jobs still
:)
- Retained document compatibility with other companies.
- The email viruses are history now.
- Etc, etc
The bad...- The older staff members had a hard time learning the new system. They are getting there though.
- Certain custom systems were not immediately portable.
Overall I'd say it has been quite successful, for us at least--- Commission free trading & free stock up to $500 - use http://share.robinhood.com/kelvinp6
Initially, never mind the TCO calculations, PowerPoint presentations and mind-numbing meetings to get a committee of PHB's to agree to shift the status quo off center. Just set up a web server or print server this afternoon on an old klunker 486 or P1 Lintel box and show them how it can magically solve an existing problem in hours rather than weeks for the regular IT approach.
Initially go for the "quick win" on a simple pilot project with immediate returns, no downtime, and no expense. (Just make sure to tell them this is what is being done, so that they don't expect a miracle re-implementation of your legacy Accounting system tomorrow AM!) Let everyone see that it was easy and not complicated and didn't interfere with the existing infrastructure or Windows-based systems. Everyone is happy and co-exists, and plays nice. Once everyone has bought into the concept, THEN you can have your ROI meetings for the bigger infrastructure changes (Linux firewalls, NIDS, app servers, desktops, etc.) that take some planning to execute.
Regards,
-Walter.
"I figure you're here 'cause you need some whacko who's willing to stick his finger in the fan. So who are we helping?
We have just finished moving the entire infrastructure of a large UK construction firm over to Linux and Open Source. The TCO gains are enormous and fall into three main categories:
- Staff. Less maintenance/repairs means staff are freed for productive work (or staff numbers reduced).
- Licences. Pretty obvious really.
- Hardware. The upgrade cycle is _drastically_ reduced. Companies depreciate hardware - if you depreciate 300k over three years it costs 100k per year. If your hardware lasts twice as long that goes down to 50k per year.
The Company has entirely eliminated its windows servers and is very happy with the cost savings. They went on record with this in last weeks 'Computing' (UK industry magazine).We have the full case study here and several pages related to TCO at here
And has for ages now. Since the original 1.x series.
Try a search on the cyrus mailing list for more info.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
1- Read a few good Linux books, or take a nice Linux Administration class.
2- Replace Windows domain controller/print/file servers with Samba servers. This part is a little rough at first, but works incredibly well once you get used to Samba.
3- Replace Exchange servers with PostFix/Qmail (Both are great, read up on both and pick the one find comfortable).
4- Replace firewalls with multi-mac linux machines running IPTables. If you are into IDS, toss snort on the box as well.
5- Sit back and compile things at random all day because your network never breaks.
The licensing for Linux is free and the majority of the applications are free (and if there not they don't cost as much as solitare on windows does). But to maintain, built apps and to use the server will cost roughly the same or lower going forward.
There is a learning curve of course but that is the initial investment that is needed with any new deployment.
Good luck.
...or people who dont know any better will insist that they need to spend $5000 on Adobe Distiller to convert Postscript documents to PDF, even though there exists a free tool that does the same (ghostscript)on Linux. This is just an example of the problems that are caused by having people who arent familiar with open-source solutions. If you hire people who know only about Microsoft, then all solutions that they come up with will involve running on Microsoft solutions, and this will negate your efforts to move off that platform. You need to either hire different people or educate the ones that you have.
There is no such thing as luck. Luck is nothing but an absence of bad luck.
Making changes to the core network at an organisation is usually best done gradually. Few company directors will be willing to replace a complete network in one go. The major benefit of free software from a directors point of view is likley to be the massively reduced software license costs. Other benefits such as TCO, reduced staffing, reliability etc. are secondary.
:)
:))
Most IT costs are written off over time, so a Win2k server costing £4000 may have £1000 taken off its value in company accounts each year. Therefore two years down the line your server is valued as an asset worth £2000 in the company accounts. After four years have passed the server will not show up on company accounts. The amount of time purchases are written off over varies from company to company, so check how your organisation operates. In my experience few finance directors are willing to replace assets that still have value to the company, so don't plan on replacing that new Exchange server just yet.
When you try to convince your management to go with free software try to honestly compare different products/technologies. I have successfully implemented several Debian GNU/Linux servers running Sendmail at a company simply by comparing the product costs in front of company directors. The comparison can be quite simple, for instance the one I used for proving email simply put the costs of Microsoft Exchange, Lotus Notes and Debian GNU/Linux Sendmail side by side like so:
License costs
Microsoft Exchange £50,000
Lotus Notes £15,000
Debiam GNU/Linux £0
This will of course provoke an argument popular with company management that the free option must be cheep and nasty. So you will need to be able to show that *NIX has been perfected over thirty years, or that the server sofware you are choosing is the best in its class for your purposes.
Once they are used to the idea you can introduce added extras such as increased reliability, improved staff motivation and management benefits like cost/performance improvement and less management overhead.
For some more hopefully helpful information look at http://www.siriusit.co.uk
Comment caveats:
1 I am not impartial, I spend most of my time implementing free software solutions so I may have a slight bias
2 The company I work for http://www.siriusit.co.uk specializes in free software implementation so they may have a slight bias too
Steve Peters
I'm sitting here at work browsing Slashdot with 'Zilla on my Redhat mail/web/SQL server next to my Windows 2000 box that's here simply to store files for about ten users and serve up a couple of web pages now and then. IIS blew up again a couple of weeks ago; now it runs Apache and that's one less thing I've had to check every day. I'm reading Slashdot because I have to keep an eye on the 2000 box while I re-reinstall Service Pack 2. Oh, look! It seems the installation has hung again. I'm installing SP2 because SP3 includes some things I don't like; mainly the ability to download and run code from Microsoft any time it feels the need to do so. So I have to apply each relevant patch as it gets posted. Nothing new there. I was doing that anyway. I'm reinstalling the Service Pack because yesterday the box decided it would pick and choose which apps it wanted to run at random, and a virus scan (Virus scan - Have I even done that on the Linux machine? Have I had a reason to?) yeilded no answer. Both of these machines are behind a hardware firewall, with only a handful of ports going to the Windows box, and yet the Windows server will still catch whatever the Malady of the Month happens to be most of the time. I'm venturing to guess this probably comes from all of our Outlook-happy staff storing files on it, but I'm thinking they'd never know the difference if suddenly Samba starts handling all of that and the worms have nothing to run on. I'm glad I was on an OSS kick when IIS failed, else I'd have probably been here all night trying to make it work before reinstalling the OS and restoring data from a backup. I've yet to know why this happened, but I don't care anymore. Ultimately, even when it's working like it's supposed to, our Windows server requires constant attention. Sure, I spent two weeks setting up this Linux machine to do what I wanted it to since I'd never been exposed to it before, but I haven't had to lay a hand on it since then, except times like this one when I catch up on Slashdot while waiting for this sad waste of hardware next to me to get its act together. Wow, it's already 10am, the 2000 box is still posessed, and I still haven't gotten any work done. I shudder to think what this would be like if I had to deal with these issues on a large scale. I have one word for you: Yes.
The company I work for saved a tremendous amount of money by setting up Linux Terminal Servers. So now our entire call center runs Linux and we don't have to pay the high costs of "Software Assurance" from Microsoft.
We moved to a completely Microsoft Free back end.
We saved well over a hundred thousand dollars in the process, we have literally maintained 100% uptime since, and the users can see no difference.
I could set you up to talk to either end users or management. Either would provide an excellent reference regarding their experience with using Linux servers instead of legacy Windows servers...
mail me at consulting@myrealbox.com
Kev.
I'm giving a talk at the Boston Enterprise Linux conference that will cover some TCO and ROI issues. It's something we do on a fairly regular basis for our clients. You can check us out at http://www.olliancegroup.com/.
Chris.
-- I don't have a cool sig.
The biggest issue is, in my mind, use common sense. Make sure you have a better understanding of your current situation (systems and how people use them). In most cases, don't make all the changes at once - plan to do things in stages, test things out before you depend on them, then deploy - and examine how that stage went so you can adjust your plan for the next stage. Maybe you start by replacing a few servers, for example. If you're replacing desktops, maybe you start with just a few systems, or you replace Microsoft Office while keeping Microsoft Windows on a few systems.There's much to be said for incremental changes.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
I liked the you might be an ER nurse if list, i.e.
I'm sure a lot of professions are the same. Can you imagine what kind of war stories cops tell each other? Hell, even traffic cops frequently deal with corpses etc.
I'm sure mortician/coroner humour is pretty bleak.
Why was "Clerks" funny? I loved it because anyone who deals with people all day realizes that people are DUMB. Some individuals might be smart, but in general, people are dumb. Human nature is dumb, often silly.
Bank tellers, store clerks, call center grunts, tech support guys... they all deal with people constantly, so they get to see some real gems of human behaviour.
In some jobs (cop/doctor/nurse) you get to deal with people at their very worst, and the dumbness/sillyness just shines right thru. My hat's off to them, I couldn't do it.
Generally it's only at the server level, although we've installed a few workstations on a "try it to see if they'll like it" basis. Servers are generally a no-brainer unless they are running some server-side MS-specific utilities.
We've found that, when asked, virtually every Developer will claim that their application will not run if Linux is the file server. In all but one case they were dead wrong. (The one case was an application that ran on FoxPro on the server.) Most applications have no clue what OS the files are stored under and couldn't care less.
The downside to switching clients to Linux has generally been a reduction in our income from that client. One client even uses the "mail" feature of Outlook (mailing contacts and appointments to other members of the group) which generally sucked until we installed a nice Dell server which we loaded with SuSE Linux. Just like Exchange but without the costs. Also, unfortunately, without the headaches because they now call us for help only about twice a year!
From almost any standpoint you can mention (original cost, administration costs, utilization of platform, etc.) Linux comes out ahead. There's even damn little training!
Try it on a few workgroups at a time and see for yourself.
No one ever had to evacuate a city because the solar panels broke!
is that many people were sold it years ago. They bought a package including 10 client licenses that cost a reasonable amount of money.
Nobody told them how expensive Exchange really was, and in a sense it didn't matter because there was nobody around to enforce the rules. The reseller was happy, since he got money for Exchange and for his installation. The customer was happy because the cost was reasonable. And Microsoft was happy because they got another suck...er customer.
Now Microsoft wants to enforce the rules (see the Business Software Alliance and the like). They figure that since people are now dependent on Exchange, they will pay up or face stiff fines.
There's a word for that type of marketing, and it's not pretty.
D
If your management is willing to give up MS Office/Outlook/IE on Windows in favor of, say OpenOffice/Mozilla on thin clients, then the TCO picture is much prettier than if they want to stick with MS on the desktop.
You simply haven't given enough information for anyone here to give you a real answer, likely because you don't have enough information yourself.
You need to sit down with your management and determine exactly what functionality you're going to replace with OSS and over what period they expect to realize the savings. At that point the questions are fairly simple: (1) does an OSS app exist which can fill this functional need, and (2) will the costs of retraining be less than the costs of licensing over the time period given to you?
If you have that info, then you can answer the question yourself. If you don't, all you're going to get is a muddle of lies, anecdotes, and resounding maybes.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/28008.html
Therefore, going to Linux is going to cause problems if you already have a Windows only infrastructure.
It'll be an uphill struggle to implement a low cost high performance Linux based infrastructure with people who don't really understand the concepts or requirements.
Course the dumber and hence loser management won't understand this either.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
If it ain't broke, get the hell out of there and DO NOT fix it.
Yes, and if the caveman hadn't realized that cooking his meat was better than eating it raw, we wouldn't have had the invention of fire.
Times change. Microsoft's way of doing business is like eating raw meat all the time.
This is not meant as a flame or an aggressive comment. I'd just like to note that you're lucky, because my experience is that W2K crahes. Less than NT or 98, but still.
I use a Win2K box with latest SP applied, mostly for office work (someone port Notes to Linux!). I run web browsers, a few telnet sessions, Notes, Acrobat Reader and a few Java apps. I have ample memory (512MB) and I am barely paging.
Yet, I often arrive at the office in the morning to find my W2K box showing a BSOD with "Starting physical memory dump". I also sometimes get a BSOD doing very innocuous things such as typing an email.
So if you know why I keep crashing and how to fix it, please let me know.
--
Mad science! Robots! Underwear! Cute girls! Full comic online! http://www.girlgeniusonline.com/