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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
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 = Total Cost of Ownership
Purchasing prices + the costs of system management.
please proff read !
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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Yeah in fact, you're true. But I think your conclusion (== Money) is little bit to fast.
/*** Got the name, waiting for the brain ***/
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
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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:
He says they are using Windows IT infrastructure.
Mother is the best bet and don't let Satan draw you too fast.
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!
Most windows printing drivers (e.g. from lexmark) can use an "lpr" network port. So you don't need to use samba for printing.
Yes, I am one.
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? (-:
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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
... 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.
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.
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
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.
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