IBM Reports Indicate Linux TCO Is Lower

Tontoman writes "Information Week reports that two research reports sponsored by IBM argue that Linux is less expensive to buy and operate than Windows or Unix. The first, a Robert Frances Group study, concluded: 'Linux is 40% less expensive than a comparable x86-based Windows server and 54% less than a comparable Sparc-based Solaris server. The Linux server's costs were $40,149, compared with $67,559 for Windows and $86,478 for Solaris.' The second, a Pund-IT report, titled 'Beyond TCO--The Unanticipated Second Stage Benefits Of Linux,' indicates that 'Linux is enormously popular among IT staff members, many of whom are at the beginning of their careers, as well as with IT educators in universities and technical institutions worldwide.' This has resulted in Linux playing a significant role in the recruitment and retention of IT staff and managers."

Comments

see .pdf

[Janek Kozicki]

Actual .pdf of the study here.

Re:a couple of surprises in article

[PIPBoy3000]

I'm admittedly a Windows person for the most part, as that's the environment I live in at work. The good news about the GUI-based environment is that it's typically fairly easy to pick up a new Windows tool and figure it out. For the semi-casual administrator/developer, that can be immensely useful.

The problem is that after a certain point, it becomes difficult to figure out complex issues. When bugs pop up, it's hard to know whether it's the software's fault or your own, with no good way to peek under the hood. When trying to extend beyond an application's capabilities, you start running into hard-coded issues that make it difficult or impossible.

We're currently migrating to ASP.Net and having internal struggles about whether or not to use Visual Studio, for example. I personally dislike being hampered by the interface, though it makes certain things much easier. The catch is that you need this bulky environment in order to work with what you create, you can't easily edit things outside of the environment, and often the application creates code for you that isn't quite what you want.

So, I'm not sure there's a clear TCO value for these sort of things. Each OS and application probably needs to be evaluated for what you're trying to do. My guess is that there will be a mix of the two systems for a long time into the future. Competition is good.

WTF?

[tomstdenis]

We built 8 gentoo linux boxes in the span of two weeks here at my office.

Cost of parts: 10K
Cost of labour: two people x two weeks x 900/week = 3600$

Other costs [power/netaccess]: trivial

So for [round up] 15K we bought, assembled, built, installed and setup 8 boxes. that's a cost of roughly 2K each.

Whoopy doo.

Where the hell does 43K/yr come from? Is that the cost of the employee as well?

Well the guy we did hire to manage this, had we planned on keeping him would cost ~60K/yr which when you split over the 32 boxes in the office is trivial.

And we don't have to buy server license upgrades or what not. So really the cost of ownership above the staffer we would have had to have anyways is ZERO. Not 43K/yr.

Tom

Re:WTF?

[Builder]

The other 43k a year is ost likely for lots of things.

It would include staff, and enterprises like banks tend to pay more for their staff than many smaller orgs.

It would include licence costs, and Linux can save you a fortune in licences. We've got a 2 CPU DL380 here that replaced a 4CPU Sun server. This means that our Oracle licences are cheaper, our monitoring software licences are cheaper and our Veritas licences are cheaper.

In an enterprise data centre there are lots of other costs that are amortised across all machines in the data centre. These include backups, monitoring, cooling, etc. In most cases these will be the same for any environment because they are environmental costs. However, where you might normally have 1 Sun V1280 taking up 8U and paying more for its floorspace, you could fit 4 HP DL380's in that space. This lowers the rack cost per server.

Like I said, lots of little things :)

Read the fine print.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://weblog.infoworld.com/techwatch/archives/003 900.html

Re:My guess is

[MrSenile]

Working with Sun equipment from the standard Blade 150's up to the Sunfire 25K's, I can say the following with ease:

1) The hardware is DAMN expensive. If you don't have sufficient support, you're paying through the nose for replacement parts. We're talking $3000 for memory. That's three thousand here. For a single DIMM. Gets really nasty when some of the mid-sized servers take 40 such DIMM's.

2) The support for servers is ALSO damn expensive. Talking Platinum service? Get our your wallet. They're 'nice' enough to give 10-30% (and sometimes 50%) discount on hardware/parts to corporations who are tied heavilly into their business, but that still makes support contracts really damn expensive.

3) The support for sun currently SUCKS ROCKS. When platinum support should have a 2 hour turnaround, and we constantly have 24 hour turnaround, that tells you something about how Sun runs their business. I guess it happens when you lay off all your expert personal and hire green off the street college students. No offense, but that's the facts.

4) The requirements are not NEARLY as reliable as it used to be. A sun box before you could shove into a dusty closet and have run for years and years without touching it. However, now, based on contractual support obligations, you're _required_ to keep up to date with patches (even if you don't need them), _required_ to keep up with firmware upgrades (even if you don't need them), and _required_ to keep explorers updated on the boxes (which while isn't a big deal, is a pain in the ass even automated). So instead of keeping up that wonderful uptime of years, you basically have an uptime of a few months, and sun boxes arn't intended to be constantly rebooted. It shows.

5) The hardware is below par. I don't know if they do what the Romulans used to do and get hardware on the lowest bidder, but it's currently sucking. 1 out of 5 systems we get have some type of hardware issue in the first 3 months. Memory, harddrive, case, motherboard, nic, fc-al, something always is going wrong. And frankly it's disgusting. PC hardware is proven more reliable, and linux right now looks damn nice compared to sun.

So you want to know why the TCO for Sun has been so high? Look above, you have your answers.

Re:a couple of surprises in article

[4of12]

The problem is that after a certain point, it becomes difficult to figure out complex issues.

My experience tells me that every attempt to flatten a learning curve at the beginning results in a steeper gradient that must be overcome later.

The really steep learning curves are practically indistinguishable from brick walls:)

Re:Don't believe either of them

[budgenator]

My overwelming experience is if it's niche proprietary software, the UI will Suck, it will not really do what you need unless you count the "well it sorta does that", if you configure it to screw-up something else you need from the vendor's sales-droid.
OBTW I'm a one man denture lab and my formal programming was in Fortran, Basic, and Cobol, my app tracks due dates, does invoices and statements in LAMP, everything I've looked at was bloated over-kill, or didn't do one of my requirements without cut and paste between apps!