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EWeek Details Linux to Windows Migration
nakhla writes "Even though we always hear stories of companies migrating from Windows to Linux, eWeek is running a story describing several companies that have migrated from Linux to Windows. Among their reasons are inadequate support options, application compatibility issues, stability problems, and the added cost of troubleshooting."
I read the article and many of the issues faced by the "switch-backers" seemed to be issues with either the software they were running (illegal user entry crashed a web-store) or a poorly managed ISP (after switching from a Linux ISP to a Windows ISP downtime decreased). I also found it just amazing that one company claimed that under Linux there were few options for an SQL server, with Oracle being the only one.
In all my experience I could never imagine a properly developed and deployed Linux solution underperforming a Windows solution or being inadequatly stable. I think that the real problem this article points out (but dosen't mention) is that the numbers of skilled Linux administrators are thinning. Even worse, the number of Linux administrators that only think they are skilled is increasing. Many of my peers going through college now like Windows because that is all they have ever known and don't want to bother learning Linux. The problem also stems from how terrible the consulting business has become. There are far too many businesses out there today that I have run into that have a guy who read Linux for Dummies and is making cold calls to customer sites running Linux implementations.
Basically, it was too hard for people to exploit my system. Now, I've got IE and IIS, and I'm open to the world! That's interopability baby.
Why did they have to use Oracle? Besides this, the article is seriously lacking in details. What type of support issues did they run into? Where they are specific things are even more mysterious. Why did the application die when too many items were ordered at once? And more importantly, what does that have to do with Linux or Apache? It sure sounds like an application problem to me. Another thing that caught my eye is that one of the companies switched to Linux without adequate internal support. If you migrate to something, anything, without training a significant portion of your staff to use it then you are asking for trouble. It seems like these IT directors wanted Linux to fail. It's a trivial task to make a project fail if you don't want it to succeed.
Added to this is that the endorsements are so glowing and positive that there is no way they can be taken seriously. I've worked with both Windows and Linux extensively, and there simply isn't such a thing as a major complex project going off without a hitch, especially when it involves migrating between two very different operating systems. I'm sure there have been similar endorsements made of Linux, "We switched to Linux and all our problems magically went away." I would be similarly skeptical of such claims.
...we've recently started migrating large blocks of code from Java to COBOL.
This way to the egress...
One of the risks to deal with companies switching from Windows to Linux is their perception on how a system should work.
A boss who's been using Windows since 3.1 will find Linux totally insane to work on because her expectation is an easy friendly GUI that does everything (goods and bads) for you.
That's probably one of the reasons why MS is giving away so many freebies to schools and universities.
Uselessful technology (Air-Charged
It's been my experience that most organizations have problems because they're staff are inadequately trained. I myself and just as guilty of slapping up incredibly-complex-software-that-has-been-shrink-w rapped-and-commoditized (ie. firewalls, mailservers, database servers, etc...) and the post-incident debrief revealed that of course there were problems- I didn't RTFM.
Apples to Apples though- correctly implemented, it has been my experience that Linux/BSD/*ix stuff is faster, more stable, and just damn better designed. The product evolution strategy is always value driven vs. some other ulterior motive (ie. revenue, locking a customer into your product line, etc). Given this, the freely available Unix distros have always provided me, & the companies I've worked at, the maximum ROI.
I was hoping to see some large-scale enterprise scenarios where Linux simply did not work - scenarios where it might make sense to put in a Windows solution. Something of substance.
These examples are terrible, and don't even begin to suggest that the issue is a Linux one.
From the article:
"When one of our guests went over the limit, it crashed the whole store. We then had to manually identify the erroneous credit card charges."
This doesn't sound like a Linux issue, it sounds like a boundary check problem. It's ridiculous to propose that this could be an OS function, and they don't back this claim up with any useful substance.
From the article:
Case said he was surprised by how well the system worked, but Linux became an issue when Combe's Web applications needed a database, and the only option available to the company was one from Oracle Corp.
What function of Oracle made it more useful than MySQL in this case? It's certainly a valid DB for Web Applications - even if Oracle might scale better.
These are some pretty baseless arguements for switching to Windows. This is essentially a public shaming of these companies.
The only database option was Oracle? Why didn't they think about back-end indepenence when they designed the application? Oh well... I think they should have looked at dropping their web application platform in favor of a more back-end independent one (J2EE, PHP, whatever) before they just decided to migrate their OS. I just can't imagine anyone these days who would lock themselves into data-tier vendor like that. Of coruse, the article wasn't very descriptive about the "why".
Case also was concerned that his company did not have appropriate in-house Linux expertise. Those concerns were proved worthwhile two years ago when the ISP gave Combe two weeks' notice that it was closing its doors.
Read: "Case didn't want to spend the extra $73,000 a year to hire a full time Sr. Unix Admin to direct his dime a dozen MCSEs." Actually, I dunno, I can't really back that up. Anyone know the cost comparison's on Linux expertise in labor Vs. MCSEs and MS licensing?
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I worked at Amazon in 2001 when Amazon switched from Solaris/Tru64UNIX to HP Netservers running Redhat Linux, if Amazon hadn't done this the company probably would have gone out of business as the IT costs of the proprietary UNIX systems were too high. Were there problems with this transition? Well yes there were, we used to joke that the website for HP's technical support for RedHat on the Netservers was www.google.com, because God knows that HP was clueless about Linux at the time. But as time passed we killed off a lot of the bugs that the system had and ended up with a very reliable infrastructure.
Linux support is getting better and better thanks to companies such as IBM and Silicon Graphics who realize that if they want to compete in the Linux market that they have to sell real Linux solutions, they can't, as Sun does, and HPaq did, tell customers that they have Linux solutions available and then attempt to push them onto systems running their proprietary versions of UNIX, bait and switch just won't cut it.
For now Linux is cutting into sales of the proprietary UNIXes just as Microsoft Windows NT started to do 10 years ago, but as Microsoft continues to get bad press over security flaws in their OS, and as ship dates for Longhorn continue to slip, and as the price of Microsoft operating systems inches ever skyward while the licensing terms become ever more onerous (and as my sentences continue to run-on...) Linux is going to start taking over a lot of the server space that Microsoft currently owns. IT is becoming a commodity, if two IT vendors can both make the case that their product is going to work for a company then the vendor with the lower cost is going to get the contract, the days of "no one ever got fired for buying IBM" which in the 90s became "no one ever got fired for buying Microsoft" are coming to a close. TCA is going to win the day and customers aren't going to care if the system is Longhorn, UNIX, Linux or the new BlargoVAX 666.
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I think this is true of this story, and a lot of the Windows horror stories you read.
;)
;)
A competent administrator with a system setup correctly from the start will almost always trump any OS with a bad administrator and / or bad setup. You wouldn't believe how many stories and comments I (and I'm sure others) have read on here about what people have done or had problems with on Windows machines, and asked why they didn't learn how to administer the machine in the first place. Now you're just going to see the same stories (true or not) cropping up about Linux, and have the same reaction. Welcome to the party
Not to say that Windows is better than Linux, or X is better than Y for any operating system - just that it seems more problems are caused by either administrators (or management) rather than the OS.
Personally I hope both Linux and Windows continue to advance. As long as we have competition, everyone wins (talk about market share all you want, but I think at this point Linux qualifies as competition).
I also look forward to the day when all the Linux administrators that say 'it cant happen on my Linux system' get to deal with the same users and managers that the rest of us have dealt with for years
So, our favorite supplier of vagisil chose a ISV who went out of business, switched to another ISV who didn't know how to support their old software, and is a model of how to run a business with Microsoft software.
Our second (and final) example of all the swarms of companies running away from Linux comes from Mountain High Ski Resort.
The people at Mountain High are a prime example of people who really should be using Microsoft Software. Some of the more classic examples include:
- "The Linux system could not handle the layers of information needed for internal control of the resort."
- Roy also had concerns about the security and reliability of the system [that had no budget for setup].
- "There was a limit set up within the program that said you can only order 'x' amount of products within one transaction," Roy said. "When one of our guests went over the limit, it crashed the whole store. We then had to manually identify the erroneous credit card charges."
Now, that last item is the kicker. I don't care if you are running your site on $500,000 IBM servers-of-doom running NASA tested software that is Guaranteed 100% bug-free. If you design any kind of commerce site which not only crashes when someone orders too many products, but brings down the rest of the server AND makes erroneous credit card charges to multiple accounts.... You need to behead your programming team.And now, one final bit of the article put here just for humor:
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
If you do a little sleuthing you will discover this is part of the MS Get the Fud program from May 2004. You relly should visit and admire the Linux = Shareware blurb.
Check with Netcraft and you will find that they reason the switched was that their ISP went out of business and the one that they teamed up with that got them to "switch" has managed to gain ZERO additional clients since. Again Source Netcraft.
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I've been a "Windows guy" professionally for about 7 years. I like ASP+IIS+MSSQL as a development platform. But the reasons for abandoning Linux given in the article are just ridiculous. They're symptoms of IT managers who clearly don't know a thing about the systems they run. From the article:
::snicker::
Combe was initially wary about its sites running on Linux, but it moved to offset that risk by making sure its provider contract had built-in service-level agreements. Case said he was surprised by how well the system worked, but Linux became an issue when Combe's Web applications needed a database, and the only option available to the company was one from Oracle Corp.
Oracle is the only database on Linux? Wow, that's news to me. On the high end, IBM's DB2 has been available for quite a while on Linux, I believe. In the midrange there's Postgres and Firebird, and in the lower midrange there's MySQL.
The potential savings were quickly erased by ongoing support expenses, Roy said. "We spent more during the first three months troubleshooting the Linux system than if we had purchased the Windows solution to begin with," she said. "The Linux system could not handle the layers of information needed for internal control of the resort.
Uhh... Linux doesn't support enough "layers of information". Riiiiiiiight. Is there a kernel option for more "layers of information" that can perhaps be enabled? Which operating systems support the most "layers of information" right out of the box?
"Roy also had concerns about the security and reliability of the system. System failures and escalating costs had the resort reconsidering its Linux decision when, over a weekend in late-summer 2002, in the midst of its season-pass sale--accounting for the sale of about 5,000 passes--the system went down. The e-commerce component stopped working for about a day... There was a limit set up within the program that said you can only order 'x' amount of products within one transaction," Roy said. "When one of our guests went over the limit, it crashed the whole store. We then had to manually identify the erroneous credit card charges."
This is obviously an application problem and not something intrinsic to the operating system. Sounds like the kind of crappy application error that could happen on any operating system. I can't believe the people involved in these stories even agreed to be interviewed in this article because they look like morons. I would hesitate to share that level of self-cluelessness with a good friend, let alone the world.
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I respect the decision of the two companies (not several as claimed by the submitting astroturfer) to switch back to windows, but there are some huge flaws in both decisions that make me wonder wehther this is not some piece of MS funded anti-Linus FUD.
Firstly, the first company, in NY, claimed, that they switched to Linux and Orcale nine years ago. I'm not sure about the timing but Orcale had, AFAIK, no Linux offerings that long ago. It's possible that the database backend came about when Orcale offered it's first Linux versions back in 2000, around 4 years ago.
If the guy was worried about the lack of Linux know-how in his company, why on earth did they even go for Linux that far back, in 1995, when Linux was nowhere near as stable and powerful as it is now? Why didn't the guy look for Linux expertise in the mean time. You cannot tell me, that by 2002, when they started their move back to Windows, that profeesional services, both for Linux (Red Hat, SuSE pro services) and Oracle (who by 2002 had moved their entire development over to Linux and for which there would have been mountains of support available). By 2002 there were multiple DB's available, MySQL had started becoming very powerful, PostgreSQL was there, and DB2 had been migrated by IBM which is no slouch when it comes to support and services.
To me it sounds like an extremely incompetent manager who went with the ASP hype in 1999 and 2000 only to get burned when it collapsed, instead of recognising, as he should have and as a competent manager would have, that the ASP model involves big risks. Why on earth didn't he just look for another one with better financials (did he even bother to look how well the ASP was doing?)
Pathetic.
Secondly, in the case of the second company, it sounds similar or even worse. The fact that their system (inhouse aparently) had major design issues. "Not designed to support x transactions per second in the programme" sounds suspiciously like a scalability problem that could have been either fixed by a reasonable programmer, or by a distributed system.
His concerns about security is pure and utter FUD given that 2002 was the year of Nimda and Code Red. The fact that the system went down for a day points to slackers not taking into account failover solutions or backup systems.
None of these desicisions say anything about Linux, but they do say a lot about the incompetence of managers and the willingness of certain so called IT news outlets to act as paid mouthpieces for a company in Redmond.