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Lockheed Replaces 10,000 Solaris Seats with Linux
bl8n8r writes "Citing hardware and software TCO, a source close to Lockheed Martin says the aeronautics giant will be replacing 10,000 of its Solaris seats with Linux. The article mentions AutoZone, IBM, SCO and Daimler Chrysler and what may be in store for Lockheed Martin.
'Every engineer has a Microsoft PC sitting next to their Sun Blade,' said their source. 'That's for business applications, and Linux is no threat there. It's Sun who has to worry.' Wait till they find out how much they can save running OpenOffice."
Business Apps don't necessarily mean "MS Office."
We consider business apps where I work:
Bioinformatic software
Data Analysis software
specialized inventory management software
I'm sure Lockheed uses CAD as well as a plethora of engineering apps that have no-where-near equivalent versions in Linux.
Wait till they find out how much they can save running OpenOffice."
We've only got ~100 PC's, and we pay about $160 for Excel/Word/Outlook. I can imagine Lockheed can work something out for the few users that need Powerpoint (managers that make presentations).
The very FIRST issue you have with OpenOffice, whether it's a formatting issue, file conversion, or other imcompatiblity, will cost MORE than Microsoft Office in the loss of productivity and IT staff.
Good call - a quick search of Google News doesn't show anything either - and I'd assume that this would be a big enough switch to turn some heads and fire off a few more articles.
Then again, it could be true and a very early report. I would of at least expect to see it on Lockheed's Press releases.
Looking for hardware (Currently need: Large Etch-a-Sketch) Have one? See my journal!
They may just find that it will be cheaper to run VMWare, or now the Free qemu, to run their office apps.
I hope that one of these days Wine will be the solution of choice.
Oddly enough, eclipse is the name of the best java ide on the planet (imho). Java is Sun's. You'd think they'd be able to put out a reasonable IDE. Unfortunately, most developers would rather be sodomized by a hot curling iron than wait for Netbeans to load.
In anycase, it sounds like they have a similar setup there as we do here with most engineers having a Sun system and a PC. I personally have a linux PC and a sunblade, both of which run open office, and I don't see any need at all for a MS PC other then for some website tools that ask/require IE (but are easily spoofed with multi-zilla plugin). It will be interesting what comes of this. I don't actually see us making a change like this away from Sun simply because there are no true replacements for the types of servers we are using from an x86 standpoint. However, as opterons become more and more available in server class systems, then maybe some of the systems will be converted over, but I don't see this happening anytime in the next 3-4 years...
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
In our last upgrade cycle we got to choose from Dell/Windows, Dell/SuSE, Sun Blade/Solaris, or Dell Laptop. Previously everyone had SGI Indy/O2/that_one_purple_box or a Dell laptop.
In engineering, I'd say 80% went for Windows, 18% Linux, and 2% Sun.
I can say that MS isn't going away anytime soon. Not only (in my particular division) does Exchange run the back end, but our engineers have integrated the authentication across the board. Want to check your pay stub online? Use your exchange domain\username and password. Want to check your training records? Ditto. Check the status of a referred employee? Ditto. Change health care coverage? Ditto. Pretty much the only thing that doesn't require that login is access to the 401k/pension site.
The division I'm in is heavily involved in software development for the government. Sun gets a lot of the business here because of the massive data storage requirements we have. 10's of terabytes is not an uncommon need. The government is also pushing towards more COTS solutions so until there are ready-to-deploy applications on Linux, Sun will still be around. Unfortunately, ready-to-deploy doesn't mean easy-to-deploy. My current project is a nightmare of integration...but that's a story for another day...
I agree. I'm an SE with Lockheed. Equipment is not purchase company wide like this. Each project purchases what type of equipment it needs with its only money. We have several Solaris machines, and there is no plans to change them. As for MS, we all have PCs on our desks, but they are mostly for e-mail and the like. Most development is done on the solaris machines (we have xwindows clients running on the PCs).
Anonymous Cowards suck.
What about the first (and 2nd and 3rd) issue that a user has with a Windows box, like a virus or BSOD or sudden inability to print?
I work in an engineering group with a mixture of Windows and Linux machines. The Windows boxes need virus scans and updates all the time, while the Linux boxes rarely get touched.
"never" is a very, very long time.
Back around 1990 my company bid on a number of NASA jobs, and teamed with companies like Lockheed and Martin. At one of them, when we had a new team of N people working on their site, the IT department showed up with a stack of N Macintoshes, old data wiped out and cleanly reinstalled with the current software. It was extremely productive, because everybody could simply write their stuff, it would all integrate together into whatever final documents we were producing, you didn't need a manual (well, almost never) because Mac software Just Works (even back then), and it was really clean except when you needed to exchange data with people who had different MS Word versions (converting between Mac and PC versions of Word would usually trash tables because one version was always newer than another.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
I have not experienced that level of problem with regular Word, although I agree that Word is a steaming pile in many other respects. The problem here is that OpenOffice is even more useless. (I'd say even less useful, except that might lead you to think I found Word useful).
Well, actually FC1 works much better than FC2. That's been my personal experience with exactly this situation. It's to the point that I hardly ever use Windows anymore on that computer. In fact, I'm very seriously considering backing up my files and wiping the Windows hard drive and going with FC1 throughout. It just works better for my purposes.
Haec merda tauri est. Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.
As I sit writing on my PC box next to my Solaris machine, I look forward to the next project which uses PC and Linux. Its a great environment.
I'd like to say that we don't use Windows for Word/PPoint/Excel. We use it for Outlook. A program I thought was shit until about a month an a half ago when I started using it in the corporate environment. The tight integration between contacts, meetings, scheduling really help cut down on the administration work I have to do to keep working.
You, my friend, are wrong. I'm in the middle of migrating all of our layout and design people from Sun workstations to $1K Dell's w/Linux, because the price to performance ration is just too dag'gon compelling. To give numbers, this is how it breaks down: we pay roughly $1,000 for a machine with a 3.4Ghz PIV, NVidia GPU (440MX 64MB), large enough harddrive, dvd/cdrw, and etc. Then we load it up with our own ram (I work for a RAM manufacturer, so I'll admit we cheat there). Add in the cost of a Redhat Enterprise WS license cost, and we have an initial cost of about $1100 with recurring annual costs of less than $100. All parts are covered under warranty for the first three years, which is about as long as we'll have these machines anyway. Compare that to a Blade 2k. Again with minimal RAM, we pay $5k for a dual-900Mhz U-III, decent harddrive, and a crappy video-card. In addition to the initial cost, we have support contracts that cost $181 per month per machine (Gold, I believe, not Platinum). That's $2175 per year. And, according to our benchmarks running our tools, it's between 3 to 5 times slower than the x86 solution (depending on the tool). Now, reliability estimates aside (we're only about 4 months into the rollout, and as such are still working out various issues), I can't think of a single reason to keep Blades on engineer's desktops. And, for the vast majority of our users (i.e., greater than 95%), Linux is all they need. They use the same web and mail tools that they're used to on Sun (Mozilla), and Crossover Office and/or Citrix fill in the gaps (when OpenOffice falls down, which isn't often).
So just *saying* that Suns are as cheap as x86 w/Linux doesn't make it so. And when you take a $2000 per year per machine difference, and multiply by 500 machines, you're starting to talk real money, even by corporation standards. And that's ignoring all of the compute servers that we are rolling over to Opterons w/Linux, for the same reason. We estimate that we'll be sending approx. $1.5 Million a year less to Sun by this time next year, in support contracts alone.