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Win2k Cheaper than Linux
An anonymous reader writes "According to this story, Win2k costs an average of 11%-22% total cost of enterprise. The study showed that the initial investment takes up less than 5% of the total cost. Linux did beat Win2k in one category, Web-serving." Man did this thing get submitted a lot.
Linux costs me anywhere between 1 hour and 5 hours to download an iso of my favorite distro. Win2k costs me 5 minutes to burn a CD-R and 30 cents to buy the blank disc. Overall I would say that since with a minimum wage job I can make 6 dollars in an hour that win2k is by far the better value.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
if you only buy a single copy and then install it on your entire network!
I love this comment on article on CRN's website:
"It just sounds strange that this article claims a five years study using Windows 2000. As of today, this study should have began by Dec. 1997 ! That means getting Windows 2000 two years in advance. "
So they must using a SWAG (Scientific Wild Ass Guess) to come up with it TCO figures.
You get meta-karma, for actually using the word "balance" in the same sentence with a link to the register. I was impressed. If course, it's unbelievably funny, but I was pretty damn impressed at the effort.
On another front, you can get well-balanced news stories here.
is that you don't get ANY points for installing it. You get 1 MS Licensing point for each copy of XP, 5 for MS Office and 10 for 2000 Server. No points at all for Linux. How can it be good for your business if you can't get any points! And levels. When you reach certain numbers of points you get new levels.
I think the new MS licensing agreement was actually a RPG system that fell into the wrong hands.
For a good headache...
MS charged us $150/h to talk to us
Well, when factoring support into TCO, don forget to include this study.
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
We can see the great benefits of a MS solution firsthand by the performance of your server.
The site www.crn.com is running Microsoft-IIS/5.0 on unknown.
What is the TCO of replacing that smoldering hunk in the corner, guys?
I saw it in IDG.net. It's pretty funny...
Well for nearly 11 years I have been in the fileserver world. I touched lots of file servers. From old ancient LANtastic and Netware 2.15, going through most Novell flavours up to 5.0. For 11 years I worked with, administered, tweaked and crunched so many different file servers that I don't remember all of them. Lots of Novell flavours, OS/2, NFS on Solaris and Linux. I worked also with Windows "solutions", from WfW up to Windows2000 Server. From all these I sincerly prefer Netware. Netware is far better and manageable than any other file server system. Naturally as Novell did it specially for file servers. However there is a problem with Novell. Its prices are prohibitive for many customers. But, if your work highly depends in file server services, surely the TCO is far lower than everyone else.
Among all the systems I used, the most crappy, cumbersome, crash-proned, time consuming and nervestraining was M$ crap. It came up into hanging a whole local network, just because M$ thought it could play at will with TCP/IP stack. But there are tons of stories about the crap. Let's just pick the most recent.
In April this year, I met a medium-sized Compaq server in one highly important organisation. Compaq's dealer sweeted a lot to have that lovely machine there. And sweeted even more to have it working. The thing worked, naturally, on Windows2000 Server. I was asked to tweak the crap so that several problems were gone. And the problems were: workstations loosing connection with the server, Apps frequently hanging up, file transfer working slowly (in a 100mbits network it looked much like 10mbits), and a episodic events with the machine crashing.
After some administration we came up to the conclusion that the machine was going into sure doom. The DNS was crashing every day, WINS and SMB were giving wrong packets into the network, the file system was getting wrong data, user accounts were not freed, CPU never lowered behind 30% and lots of many other problems. Besides we found that, everyday, 30 minutes of workday was lost on backing up data (it was a damn important server) as no one could work while backup was going on.
Well, we created a backup server, curiously on Linux, but with the objective to reinstall Windows2000 on the main server. We lost ONE week trying to do it. As we discovered, the original installer had also huge problems with that machine. The machine was simply unable to work stable with Windows2000.
Considering the pros and cons I decided to use my old weapon The Penguin Dancing Samba, against the huge oposition of many people. However the situation was Hell in Flames and there should be a fast solution. So the bosses agreed the change.
Well I had a whole day of headaches to install it on Compaq's RAID. Also I had lots of trouble creating a secure, stable and automatised environment. In the whole, it took me 2-3 weeks to do all the work.
Today, nearly half-year later, the admin approaches the server 1-2 times in the week. Most work is log checking and some rare tweaks in the configuration (mostly adding users), the machine carries several early warning scripts in case something goes wrong. Backup is completely automatic. With the exception of one single user (some mystic problem), everyone works without hangups, crashes or lost connections. The system lives perfectly in its 100mbps network and the problem of slow connections is forgotten. Besides, the average load of this machine is just 3% and it now carries also a MySQL server that is frequently used and which, in the future, may substitute many file server tasks.
Is this the the higher TCO they talk about?