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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."
But Linux's licensing-cost edge is likely to wane as Microsoft and some Unix vendors, notably Sun Microsystems, lower their prices.
Competition drives prices down...who'd of thought...
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
Per-OS TCO does not exist in a vacuum. Organizational direction, sunk costs from previous IT investments, interoperability with business partners / clients / vendors... each of these is a factor that will be different for EVERY business making the Linux/Windows/etc. choice.
IMO a well-run organization will have a hybrid environment.
That being said, it is useful for planning purposes to know in which situations Linux TCO beats Windows and vice versa.
The president has been kidnapped by ninjas!
Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?
remember that IBM has a substantial interest in Linux. If it was the other way around we'd be crying foul about how studies will always find in favour of whoever's funding them. Anyone know if there's ever been a truly independent comparison
I am trolling
that an IBM-funded report favoring Linux won't get treated with the same healthy scepticism that a Microsoft-funded report favoring Window.
Folks : if you treat any of these studies as anything other than another form of advertising, you're a fool.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
This study will be very useful as a counterbalance to the MS-funded studies, andgiven that it's backed by IBM, it can't be as easily ignored by management as some of the other, recent refutations of MS's results.
News, no. Good PR, most definately.
And it's not even the up-front hardware costs that can kill you (Solaris 10 on an opteron is actually pretty damned price-competitive), it is the relative rarity of the applicable skillsets (and there can be a world of difference between a high-end Solaris, AIX, etc. machine and your common linux server on Dell hardware or whatever) which leads to increased salaries for the in-house administrative staff and the cost of vendor maintenance contracts which tend to be much higher than you might expect coming from the windows/x86/etc. world. (On the other hand, with proprietary Unix you do sometimes get what you pay for. High-end support from a single vendor who provided both the hardware and software in a system can be pretty reassuring if you have a business-critical system, and proprietary Unix runs on hardware that in some cases can do things that your common x86 stuff just does not scale to, both in terms of reliability and in terms of capability. As with all things, tools have jobs they are better suited to than others.)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Every time MS puts out a report that Windows TCO is lower, everyone here dismisses it as propaganda. What about this time? IBM has a substantial investment in Linux and I noticed that their own AIX wasn't used as an example. It's just another case of manipulating the facts to fit one particular view. To call it anything else is intellectually dishonest.
My guess would be:
1. Nobody knows how to use it, everybody coming out of school these days is used to using Linux and/or BSD, from this perspective Solaris does a lot of weird things for no reason.
2. Much as Sun's pushing Solaris/x86, if you're using Solaris, you're still pretty much going to be using expensive, locked-in Sun hardware. (Of course that hardware is probably more reliable, but sometimes lower TCO means you get what you pay for).
3. Sun is a competitor to IBM who commissioned the study, maybe the study misrepresents Sun TCO in some way.
Sparcstations are just too reliable. We have machines from 1991 running NIS+ and some other stuff. No manager making a purchase decision is ever going to believe that a server will run for 15 years without a glitch, and he is not going to spread the TCO over 15 years. Nobody in the organization is qualified to touch the machines, and many of the windows system admins who have taken over don't even know they exist.
The windows admins occasionally screw up the network (like when they made the NIS+ servers unreachable by changing the IP numbers of the only two sparcstations allowed to access them), and then we immediately hire an expensive external admin to solve the problem.
Lessons:
- Sun hardware is too reliable: the machines will be technologically obsolete before they fail. Sun can save costs there, because nobody appreciates it anyway unless they are building a spacecraft or nuclear power plant.
- Comparing an x86 machine against a sparcstation based on a lifespan of 5 years is completely unfair. We spend an expensive two weeks configuring a new sparcstation, and then let it run for 15 years. The Windows machines are tinkered with all the time by cheap Windows idiots. The sparcstation gets cheaper as time progresses (if Windows administrators cannot interfere with its operation).
- What about the costs of letting Windows idiots tinker with your infrastructure all the time? THEY are the ones that create the problems for the sparcstations in our organization because they don't know what they are doing.
On Linux you can look at a config file that *gasp* gives you the same information that those checkboxes are - the settings that the system is running under.
Once Linux / Unix / Windows / Any OS has a massive failure - it is complicated to troubleshoot and you need knowledge of how the server and applications work. It's a conceptual nightmare.
In other words - if you talk to a good Windows admin they'll think that the Linux system is a conceptual nightmare because they're used to Windows. If you talk to a *nix admin they'll tell you Windows is a conceptual nightmare because they're used to *nix.
Basically if you don't know the underlying architecture in either system and try and just fake things by guessing - you're not going to get far in a real problem situation. I don't see that as a benefit or drawback of Linux/Windows - just a fact of life. Good administrators have a lot of knowledge about their systems and environment.
That makes the best description of windows vs unix usiability I think I've ever heard.
Summed up as:
Windows makes easy things easier and hard things harder. Where as Unix makes hard thigns easier but easy things harder.
Windows low cost of entry expensave maintance, unix high cost of entry, lower maintance.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
"I don't care what it's doing, a fifteen-year-old machine is obsolete NOW."
The hardware may be obselete, but if it is still doing the job you replace it when it fails (or ideally just before). Not having a replacement plan could be an issue, and I suspect these people don't.
The idea there is some perpetual upgrade path we all must walk is a myth created by the IT industry to keep sales figures high, and sustained in part by bad software engineering.
It isn't even obvious they have a management issue, just because they get outside help to sort problems on the boxes, if they only have an issue every few years it is cheaper not to employ the expertise.
I've had 10 year old systems fail whilst still under vendor support contracts, fixed and returned to service inside 24 hours, why should we have replaced them if the economics didn't justify it?