Slashdot Mirror
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.
Google: IDC microsoft
and you will see taht IDC has a history of tooting the MS horn.
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
Five years of Windows 2000? Let's see, if Windows 2000 came out in 1999, then it's been out for 2000, 2001, 2002...that's only three years. So there must be some extrapolation going on here, even if we allow that some of these shops were using a beta version of Win2k a year ahead of release. Then there is the question of hardware costs, since Linux potentially needs less hardware to perform the same jobs. And finally, it'd be nice to know how the 104 shops were picked.
Insert standard Mark Twain "statistics" comment here.
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
Of course the Windows apologists will point out that Linux has security holes too and they would be right. I do spend a portion of my time trying to make sure my Linux system remains secure. 9 times out of 10 when the security bulletin comes out, apt-get has already fixed the problem. But you know, if I were running Windows here, would I be spending any less time making sure my system was secure? I don't think so. Perhaps that's the difference in pay between the Windows admin and the UNIX admin.
Sorry if I rambled a bit here. Haven't had my coffee yet.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
You laugh? I worked at a company back in 2000 that put a serious investment into developing a website, with a Windows 2000 back end of course. This was a Fortune 500 company, so of course Microsoft conned them into hiring a bunch of MCSDs to code the thing at some insane price. It ended up costing several million for the whole shebang, which included space at Exodus for a 4 webserver cluster, behind an F5 and dual PIXs, with the database running off two quad Xeon boxen sharing a SAN. This all ran Windows 2000 Advanced Server so they could use the HA clustering functionality.
/.ed I'll be able to take a look =). I'll still take it with a grain of salt, as I would any report comapring the TCO of either of these products. Lies, damn lies, and TCO studies indeed.
Anyhow, I worked a later shift, and got to monitor in the evenings. Every evening, without fail, I watched each and every machine in that HA cluster get rebooted =). "Scheduled Maintainance" I imagine.
Don't get me wrong though, this isn't an MS bash. I'm and MCP, RHCE, etc, and use both Windows 2000 on the server and desktop, as well as Linux on the server and desktop. Each has their place.
Maybe when the server hosting this report isnt getting
I have to agree with you and even extend the thought. How many companies really have enough experience with Linux in areas other than web serving to even make a wild hairy-assed guess about admin costs over five years?
How about system recovery? eventualy every peice of hardware is going to take a puke. How hard is Win2K or Linux going to be to recover, have enough actualy crashed to even estimate?
My guess is that as Linux penetrates further into the data center, and there is more experience top-to-bottom in the IT staff that Linux's cost will drop further than Win2K's will because linux will self-administer easier.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
well the original article was about tco of running linux as a server, and not really aimed at developers.
one thing to not about Free software is that the support base from the community is huge. as a result when you are having problems there are many more resources available for you online than there are for proprietary software. also people developing Free software are more likely to admit bugs and problems with their system than those who close their source to the public.
my own personal expirences have shown that developers in the linux community are more likely to respond to you personally than those from say microsoft. take for example a problem i was having with a network card. i was getting strange errors in syslog and i wasnt sure what they ment. i poked around on the net and i couldnt figure out what was wrong. in a last ditch effort i emailed donald becker. perhaps you've heard of him, he writes most of the linux network interface drivers and he came up with a little clustering concept called beowulf.
well i emailed him with the problem i was having, and do you know what he did? he didn't ask me for money, or a credit card number, or a beer. he emailed me source code for a diagnostic program. i emailed the results back. this continued for a couple hours and eventually we determined that the nic was bad. oh did i mention that he responded to my initial query within an hour?
now i ask you, if i emailed support@microsoft.com and asked them for help with my nic do you think the guy who wrote the network card drivers for windows would respond to me personally within an hour to work out my problem for free? this is the difference between support costs in windows and linux. you might not appreciate them, but i do.
-- john
One of the common citations that are bandied about is that Linux admins make more than their Windows counterparts. But, the evidence seems to contradict this "wisdom". Most of the Linux admin jobs that I see posted offer lower salaries than comprable Windows admin positions. Surveys, such as this, also indicate that Linux admins are actually paid less than their MCSE counterparts. This naturally begs the question, are Linux admins truely more expensive than the Windows admins?
Another issue is the "difficulty" of administrering Linux, as compared to Windows. While, there are some valid arguements to support this hypothesis, there are also some important details that are seemingly ignored. That is, the difficulty is in fact due to unfamiliarity. Windows admins are unfamiliar with Linux and it is therefore more difficult for them to administer it. But, were these Windows admins born knowing how to administer Windows? Is Windows truely so simple that they can do it without any prior knowledge?
No! The fact is that the Windows admins have had specific training in administering Windows. They have gone to classes, MCSE Boot Camps, seminars all about how to manage Windows. They also have a bookshelf FULL of Windows administration books that they have studied. Now, after all that, Windows is familiar and relatively easy for them to administer. I challenge anyone who makes the difficulty claim to build a bookshelf of equal size to their Windows one. If these people read just as many books on Linux as they have on Windows Administration, they would not find it any more difficult than Windows. This would likely be true even without any Linux classes or Linux Boot Camps.
It has been proven by a legion of CNEs who find Novell no more difficult, in many cases far easier to manage than Windows. Yet The same Windows admins will say that Netware is MUCH harder to manage than Windows.
Also, on the subject of training etc. These TCO reports always factor in the expense of Linux training. However, they do not seem to factor in the cost of Windows training. Let's not forget that the books and the classes and the MCSE boot camps cost a lot of money. Even if that money has already been spent, it must be factored into the TCO. These MCSEs were not born knowing how to administer Windows 2000. It costed thousands of dollars each to raise this generation of MCSEs. In most cases these training courses were paid for by the companies. How can they be simply ignored by the TCO studies? Are these MCSEs going to live forever, or are they going to be replaced by a new generation that will have to aslo be trained at a cost of thousands per head?
By contrast, who keeps a Microsoft product for five years without upgrading it? Especially in a corporate environment? ... Agreed, most companies don't go 5 years without upgrading but there are certainly some that do.
Actaully, I'd say that the majority of medium to large corporations don't upgrade their OS any more frequently than 5 years. In a large company, it can take several years to work out a stable config that will work with older machines and servers during the transition, budget for it, and (the kicker) distribute it to all their employees. Most large companies use every other version of windows (many will likely skip XP and wait for Longhorn or whatever comes next, since 2000 is 'good-enough') since they come out too quickly to keep upgrading. Sure, the developers might need custom Win XP (or linux or anything) workstations, but most users will not know the difference between NT, 2000, and XP. If there are any day-to-day problems they have in NT or 2000, they're already used to dealing with them and aren't desperate for a new version on their workstation.
And companies which depend on their mainframe servers for critical business processing will hardly ever change the system. Taking a chance at diabling their entire operation is just not worth a few more features or faster processing, for most business operations.
$8.95/mo web hosting
When you purchase and install a Win2K product, you give Microsoft the right to "audit" you. They performed one of these audits on a company I worked for. I am certain we owned all of the software that was on our machines. We had a corporate policy of no piracy, buy what we need.
We just couldn't produce EULAs for 13 out of over 600 products. Their lawyers also wanted $6000 for the MSDN copies we had. These guys don't seem to even understand Microsoft licensing and appear to be trying to squeeze you for every cent. I had to fax the MSDN user agreement stating that MSDN CDs could be freely distributed within the company. It did not seem to matter to the law firm that we could produce the CD covers for the other products. No EULA, no credit. It cost the company $13,000 to settle. The lawyers got 2/3rds of that for their "work". The remaining third went for purchasing software which I feel we already owned.
I felt scammed and violated. This ticked me off so I looked for alternatives. I discovered FreeBSD. I installed SAMBA and had the same fuctionality as a Windows Server without the risk. I had to buy 2 Samba books to figure it out. I had to reinstall FreeBSD multiple times until I figured out how to do it. I can do it now in my sleep. It is not that FreeBSD is harder, it was just unfamiliar.
If you think this is an isolated incident, it is not. Audits happen everyday. Sometimes, the target really deserves the attention, sometimes it is just Microsoft biting a hand that feeds them. Sometimes, Microsoft's lawyers go over board and put the squeeze on a non profit or school and then people squak at Microsoft. Then there are a number of small companies that, unwittingly, find themselves in a bind.
There are alternatives to some of the Microsoft software. I suggest to everyone that will listen to use the alternatives first.
I'm not going to try to defend the notion that a Linux desktop has a lower TCO than a Win 2K desktop, because frankly I doubt that it does. Linux requires admins which, unlike MCSEs, aren't churned out by the dozens by your local community college.
The problem I see here is that most of these Linux vs. Windows TCO studies hinge on the idea that you are replacing a Windows 2000 desktops with a full-fledged Linux desktops, and that's the wrong way to do it.
I'd like to see a unbalanced TCO review of what the City of Largo, Florida has done. Basically, they've got 800 very cheap thin clients (230 concurrent) running X-Windows applications (KDE, etc.) off of a couple big-ass terminal servers. Very similar to the Linux Terminal Server Project, and very cool.
There are so many businesses paying $200 for Win 2K Pro and $350 for MS Office just so their employees can send email and dabble in Word or Excel. It's insane. They could be saving $550 per machine in software costs alone! Not considering the fact that the thin client hardware costs much, much less than the average desktop. And there's essentially zero administration costs on the clients. Let's see a TCO comparison on that.
I'm starting to get off-topic, but I'm excited about the project so what the hell. I'm currently doing a little in-house pilot of the same thing at my employer. I've customized the KNOPPIX bootable ISOs to basically be X-Windows thin clients. You just pop the CD in a machine, reboot, and you get a KDM login box for our terminal server. Very, very cool. Even free server licenses from Microsoft couldn't persuade me to drop this project.
Still running NT3.51 and 4.0 over here and I have yet to see the gun pointed at me forcing me to upgrade. I still get support from my vendor, and the machines are (surprisingly) running so well that we rarely touch them.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
These results are based on a *survey* of businesses, and it reflects what they *think* the 5-year TCO is going to be, so all you guys who are fixated on flaws of the study or that Win2K wasn't available 5-years ago are missing the point. The point is that this is what the business world believes, not what reality is. You can complain all you want about MS, but I think of it as a good wake-up call: it tells us what the rest of the world is thinking about Linux and points out where we ought to be focusing our efforts.