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Linux Is Cheaper
An anonymous reader writes "ZDNet is running a story on what a lot of us already know: Linux IS cheaper than Windows. This not because it is free. It is because Linux admins, although slightly more expensive, can handle a significantly larger number of systems than their Windows counterparts."
I have no doubt that Linux is cheaper in a lot of situations, but I am also sure that Windows, or indeed any other OS, is cheaper for some things.
There can be no one perfect solution.
That other Slashdot story that told us what a lot of us already know: Windows IS cheaper than Linux was clearly hokum. This'll finally shut those monkeys up.
Oh wait, the second sentence is Most analysts, if asked whether Linux has a lower TCO than other systems, will answer, "It depends."
Glad they wrote a whole article about it.
"If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
How much more beating can this dead horse take? I feel like I'm watching Gilligan's Island.
"Derp de derp."
It is because Linux admins, although slightly more expensive, can handle a significantly larger number of systems than their Windows counterparts.
Th-they skirt over this point a bit too quickly. The obvious reason that Linux admins are better sysadmins (overall) and can admin more machines is because they're, er, mostly self-taught.
After all, how many great sysadmins spent years pouring over 'How to be a Linux admin' books, struggling to get their 'LCE' (Linux Certified Engineer) certificates? None. Unh. Yet that's exactly how Microsoft admins are raised.
Linux admins (and originally users) are experimenters.. that's why they're not on the MS platform. Experimenters make good sysadmins, because they learn by themselves, learn clever admin tricks through experience, and, er, don't just rely on a bit of paper that says 'I'm a good sysadmin.'
I'd be a bit weary about the point that Solaris admins can 'learn Linux' (ohh, unh) within a few weeks though. People from stricter UNIX disciplines think Linux is some, er, easy-to-learn UNIX renegade. (unh, unh) It ain't true folks, it's like deep and stuff.
mogorific carpentry experiments
Its i18n, l10n, p12n, and c11n! I can have linux in any language I want without having to buy my operating sytem in a country that uses that language. Its translated in to many more languages too, around 90 are avalible for kde alone!. nynorsk was avalible for years before Micrsoft supported it!
Its still a bit rough (it could do with support for non gregorian calanders for example) but its proof that linux is for everyone everywhere!
The real merits is not because it is free, but because it gives you a choice and control!
include the cost of working out the TCO?
In the short-run, this can sometimes hurt a business, because the DIY crowd often like to build it themselves rather than buy it. But in the long-term (and with proper management), having a crowd of DIY people will save you a bundle. While the windows support staff are stuck trying to install MS-Word, the linux folks are fixing router problems, patching security holes and tuning your intranets.
Sex - Find It
I have a linux web/mail server running for a local non-profit organization of which the exectutive director is a friend of the family. Their website is very small, and doesn't need to be updated often. It gets about 100 hits a month. :) If they need the page to be updated, they send me the new text, and I update it via SSH.
I have had that server running for over 5 months now, and I haven't needed to physically visit the server in 4 months. That was because of a power outage; not even Linux is more powerful than God
The point I'm trying to make here is that this nonprofit has no IT department, no sysadmins. They are mainly 50 year old ladies who are smart enough to not ask what the difference between RAM and hard drives. They have a low cost webserver running, which is freeloading on a broadband connection they already have. They don't touch the server, which lies in the corner of an empty supply closet.
Let's see... The article states that Linux/Unix admins USUALLY do cost more, but now they don't due to the tech slump. In other words, the TCO is lower because of all the out of work admins drove down salaries. Therefore, more sophisticated Linux/Unix admins are getting screwed.
Now answer the question, "Aren't you happy to hear Linux is now cheaper?"
You can't compare Linux TCO with Windows TCO, because Windows doesn't have one. You don't own anything with windows. Windows TCO is a myth and should be called Windows TCL - Total Cost of licenseship.
"Summary Ley you can under wine with success... and they are porting it!"
We're months away from having the screamernet version (i.e. render only, you still need a Windows machine to set up the animation/modelling etc) and probably at least a year or two away from a Linux version.
Which is fine. If Linux is a good OS that'll run Lightwave a year or two from now then I'll be happy to evaluate it.
Just to be clear: I'm not saying Linux is worthless, I'm saying that this zealousy over it won't solve anybody's problems. As a matter of fact, it'll probably cause problems. Most of my company frequents Slashdot. Let's say they were taken in by the hype and adopted Linux. Guess what? Expectations are high, which means that every little problem will be blown out of proportion. Before you know it, everybody's anti-Linux.
We're already having that happen today. Some of the engineers have been moved to Linux, and they're fussing over every idiotic problem that Windows just doesn't have. The worst part is having to look up badly spelt commands in order to figure out what to do. They're having to make compromises in order to get through their day.
If this happens on a grand scale, then what? You get the bigwigs around companies everywhere saying "What a nightmare. I'll stick with the company that understands our needs best."
Slashdot'd be smart to pull back on these worthless debates. Raise the bar too high and Linux'll never be accepted.
It is because Linux admins, although slightly more expensive,
I've said this before but, while the above statement is frequently bandied about, I do not see evidence of this in the real world. Indeed the majority of job postings that I see for Linux sysadmins offer salaries that are a fair bit less than similar positions looking for MCSEs.
Indeed, there are also several commonly used salary surveys on the net that seem to indicate that Linux sysadmins are paid less than their Windows counterparts. I've even seen a few stupid cases where positions requiring Linux experence and an MCSE certification actually paid less than similar positions requiring an MCSE only.
Is this only the case in my region or is it the case on a wider scale?
...last stat I heard was one MS admin for every 15 boxes and one Mac admin for every 150 ~ 300 boxes. It's called TCO, and one of the reasons a Mercedes can be less expensive over the vehicle's lifetime.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it - according to the article.
And that is the problem with Windows. By the time i had gotten most of my servers to NT4, they were shoving Win2k down my throat. After i had gotten everyone onto Windows NT 4.0 workstation, i couldn't get it any more - i was forced to have W2k and NT4 Wkstn running side by side.
Windows, unless you just refuse to be able to run certain software, requires you to change everything every 2 years. Its a nightmare.
Mac OS X and FreeBSD wouldn't have required me to change so much stuff over the last two, years, and i don't see a big deal with the next few either.. while windows admins will HAVE to incorporate XP into the networks, because they will have no choice.
guns kill people like spoons make Rosie O'Donnell fat.
A President of linux consultancy says that linux admins can handle more boxes than a windows admin.
This study is stupid. As a rule, there are more windows admins than anything else, because that is what the market demands. As a result, there are more $30-40k deserving windows admins who would get their hands full with a lot of boxes. Still, if you need admins for a 100,000 hit a day web site (which doesn't sound all that high to me), you need to hire people who can roll out identical, customized machines in short time, have experience monitoring, and can batch updates, etc. You can hire a bunch of cheaper admins, who will install hotfixes one at a time, rebooting each time, or you can hire one or two good admins who can qchain em together, and reboot when all are installed. TCO is as much a function of management and hr's hiring skill as it is or anything else.
ostiguy
If your company tried Linux on the basis of hype, it probably means they initially got hooked on MS hype too. I doubt either decision was made objectively or wisely. Did it occur to your Slashbot bosses that maybe they should have only tried Linux out on a few machines first? That way it needn't have caused any significant pain. Also, a newly deployed Windows system isn't that hot either. You're co-workers are comparing something that's probably had months or years of bug-fixes, tweaking, and workarounds to something they just adopted. NEWSFLASH! Everything sucks just in different ways. Like any tool, Linux can do the job wonderfully once it is learned. Of course, you'll mash your thumb a few times on the way. Here's another newsflash: You've had years to forget how much it hurt when you first started using it. Don't bs me otherwise. I cut my PC teeth on 3.1 and have cursed at every version up to and including XP.
Linux doesn't sound like a problem here. Quit believing hype and maybe you'll have better new product experiences.
Incidentally, Slashdot is not a monolith. We have 15 year old young minds who think every piece of OSS software is GPLed and anyone who makes money with it is a thief as well as 15 year old Young Republicans who think OSS is communism. I'm sure others can think of even more savory types who hang out here. Remember, the IQ of a mob equals the intelligence of it's stupidest member divided by the size of the mob. It's pretty useless to give it advice.
windows IS completely scriptable.
Isn't this one of the main reasons Windows is such a problem on both the desktop and in the server arena?
Not just the scriptability (Mac OS X goes a long ways in this regard) but the looseness of the implementation, which is the big reason admins stay so busy patching, etc.
what it really comes down to is a CLI and a good scripting language. Now windows machines claim to have a scripting language but to use it effectively you have to go through a GUI not a CLI thus network admin of unix machines is not for the faint of heart. This situation gets worse when you start trying to configure services (web servers, etc...) that also have GUI interfaces rather than text configureation scripts.
On the otherhand admin of linux across a net is pretty darn easy. When you start getting into having your main disks not be the local disks life gets even simpler in Linux.
On the otherhand, I suspect that the better a desktop machine becomes the more GUI administration is going to be important on linux. Consequently it may lose some advantages in fleets of desktops.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Oen thing to note: the "less staff required" can often count against things in "managerial empire-building with lots of petty political power struggles" environments, which are unfortunately very common. Telling a manager "you'll need less staff" is not necessarily the best route to his heart, they might even take it as a threat.
No, that's not a healthy corporate culture. But in big companies and semi-states (a mainly european phenomenon where state-owned companies kinda-sorta privatise), it is a common one.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
And this is why windows admins don't understand how Linux admins manage that many machines. VNC is a bad hack that you'd only use if you needed cross platform remote display. You do realize that if you really needed to remotely run graphical apps, X programs are inherrently remote displayable. Not only that, but the power of linux administration is the fact that you *never* need to run a graphical program. If I have a farm of 150 web servers, I can make an httpd.conf on one of them and with a 3 line shell script (typed interactively on the command line) scp it to every machine on the network and restart those webservers. Or I could tie it to a cron job, or a script monitoring /var/log/messages for a certain event like a service going down, or have procmail do it when it recieves an email. Yes I know with the right packages and third party tools windows is scriptable as well, but its not designed around scriptability. The simplest way to permanently change the host name of a machine is still to go in with vnc (or terminal services, I have to be fair) and open up the network configuration dialog and change it. Which is easy, I admit. But over a slow network its infuriating. I can ssh in from a modem and edit /etc/sysconfig/network with vi and it'd be just as responsive as if I was on the local network. Again, I see the benefit of both approaches, but never would I personally want to administer a significantly large windows data center when a unix based solution was feasable.
"Always in motion is the future" said Yoda. Decisions need to be "future-proofed". That needs flexibility. If you have room to manouver then you can react to the unexpected. Open source gives you that room to manouver.
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
I maintain a few services on ~9000 Solaris boxes, all across the world (you name it, India, Europe, North America, etc). I routinely run commands to do various things (check software installed, tweak syslog, install new ssh, install patches, etc) on 1000 boxes AT ONCE. Yes, at once, as in concurrently. We built a cluster of linux boxes using OpenMosix that allows us to do 1000 concurrent outgoing SSH sessions. We've developed some SSH load balancing tools that basically spread the authentication load of these 1000 sessions across several hundred ssh-agents.
..and yes, it is all perl/shell scripting, combined with the proper (typically homegrown) tools.
So yes, it IS reasonable that somebody can maintain 1000+ servers, depending on what they are doing. The key is CONSISTANCY. If all servers are one-offs installed by hundreds of people all in different ways things can be difficult, that's why we have standards.
-- I speak only for myself.
This is all fine and dandy but money isn't the object. It's about what you want to do and how you want to do it. If *nix does what you want and Windows doesn't then the choice is made for you. If they both do what you want but your people are more comfortable doing it in Windows then that's what you go with.
I'm not saying that money isn't a factor at all. Sure it is. But if money was the main factor in the decision for a company, and I were a stockholder in that company, I would be very concerned. If they were switching from Windows to *nix based on cost, I would have to wonder if their eye was really on the end goal.
In my case I operate a public safety system, a 911 dispatch center. Our radio consoles and recording system all use Windows NT and 2K. We KNOW it would be cheaper to use *nix. We KNOW the system would be more reliable. Our CAD system runs AIX and sets a great example to prove the point. All that doesn't matter one single bit. Why? First off it's propriatary equipment and only runs on Windows so we cant change it. Second we couldn't justify the down time for the change and operator training.
It's not about price or TCO. If that's what starts to drive the *nix community then they will lose big time. Focus on doing a job, doing it well, and making it a pleasure to do the job. That will win customers/users in the end, not price.
This comming from a man know by family and friends as a tightwad.
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
Taking that TCO stands for "Total Cost of OWNERSHIP" then this cant be applicable to windows, since you dont actually own a copy of windows that you buy, you merely have a revokeable license to use it.
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I know, flamebait, but I'll bite.
OpenLDAP with SSL works fine in my experience, never had a headache from setup to implementation. Active Directory does indeed work out of the box. But when third party tools need to interact with it or you need some schema changes, things can go to hell in a handbasket quickly.
Your argument about client policy management is referring to Windows client policy management. I will give that Windows is superior to Linux at distributing policies to clients, but we are talking about Linux across the board. You have a lot more power across the board when you don't have to rely on samba to accomplish things. Also, with NT4 clients (which is often unavoidable in Windows networks on a budget), Samba actually offers a bit more power and flexibilty when dealing with those 'legacy' clients.
Remote software installation better on Windows? You have got to be kidding. Some applications do work fine for doing convenient remote applications. Sometimes Terminal Services is required. I have seen apps that will only successfully install from the console (or, by extension VNC).
I'll admit the MMC is a decent remote administration tool, but I would not give it as much credit to say it is good at managing multiple systems at once. I haven't really seen anything under windows that is any better than anything under linux as far as managing groups of computers at once.
Remote administration under Windows is much more of a pain than any *nix. Almost anything can be done through ssh and the system doesn't care. For gui, all X11 windows are created equal, whether local or remote. X11 is a bit talky in terms of bandwidth, but it is rarely needed. Windows administration first off requires GUI to be forwarded. Second off, Remote Desktop frequently behaves differently from the console, making VNC a requisite practically for those apps that break in RDP world. Why the hell VNC would be needed for much in Linux is beyond me. I rarely have to use X11 even.
And to say Windows 2000 is kerberos with no dicking around is a travesty. Have you ever tried to use the built-in facilities for anything other than Windows clients, or try to get Windows clients to authenticate against an alternative LDAP/Kerberos implementation? They bastardized kerberos just enough to make it desirable to be an all-ms shop. That is their business, making non-ms interoperating with MS too clunky to try. For an all Windows network it is fine, but in that case it might as well be something proprietary, so kerberos is just a buzz word hinting at interoperability that just isn't there.
You seem to have been comparing built in facilities to third party applications when oit comes to Enterprise monitoring. I haven't really bothered to try many third party products when it comes to this area, and I'm not sure what *exactly* you mean by enterprise monitoring specifically, so I'll leave this alone.
And finally, with regards to automatic updating. No sane administrator trying to maintain a consistant environment blindly runs auto-update. One, you test out patches before giving the big ok to mass deployment. For another, Windows updates requires reboots 99% of the time for update package installation. That really makes reliabily sink. If you are really crazy enough to do auto-updates and trust parties outside your organization, you can easily use up2date automatically or apt as a massive cron job.
My final point is that clearly you are a relatively seasoned Windows administrator. I have been in that role too. Both times they let me go in favor of a cheaper administration who was 'good enough'. These replacements often have no idea how to fully exploit the features available in Windows. When talking with them, they never know that AD is an LDAP system, or even what Kerberos is. The only thing they ever do is vnc (yes *vnc in*) to the domain controller to modify user accounts not realizing the power of mmc to make it easier. That is the extent to which they interact with AD. These are the people who cannot by themselves efficiently manage larger networks.
And it is becoming increasingly hard for businesses to tell the good from the bad. The market is so saturated of people who were pretty decent and jumped at the 'get your MCSE with us' commercials, that finding good administration is hard. Linux scares these people by and large, so the market of Linux administrators is a lot more pure. If and when RHCE becomes 'hot' like mcse, you'll see a lot more junk Linux admins too...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I have just finished deploying twenty old (P133-300) computers in five locations for my current client. They all run Linux off of cds, with no hard drives. To upgrade, I send them a new cd. They never shut them off and haven't had a (software related) problem yet.
Someone else mentioned LTSP+Mosix. All of you Windows noobs should take a serious look at this project, and re-evaluate some of your prejudices about how to configure and administer a network of "desktops". The absurd amount of computing resources that an all-M$ setup requires (1ghz desktops, servers in every physical location, etc..) can be put to much better use just by expanding your OS horizons a little and giving Linux a chance.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"