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Mindbridge Saves "Bunches of Money" In Switch To Linux
While Mindbridge didn't start out as an open source company, it has since managed to save what they can only describe as "bunches of money" by switching to Linux. "Today, Mindbridge has repurposed itself as an open-source-friendly company, and revamped its infrastructure to run completely on Linux and other open source software. 'Having deployed [Linux servers] to our customers, we turned around and said, we can do the same thing internally and save bunches of money. We began a systematic but slow flipping of servers from the Microsoft world over to predominantly Linux — although there are a few BSD boxes around as well,' Christian says. 'It's to the point that today I only have two production Windows servers left, out of 15 or so.'"
Mindbridge Switches to Linux Saves Bunches of Money is it me or is this headline a wet dream for most slashdot posters ?
Fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more on your operational cost.
When you have finished this cup of coffee your adventure will begin again.
If they threatened to swich to Linux, then they'll get to use the same MS products at Linux price.
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
Was this thing written by a 4 year old? I was expecting to see OMG PONIEZZZ!! at the end.
Software costs nothing.... Compared to the cost of supporting it.
Isn't it obvious? Back when VA Linux was a hardware company, they had hardware to make the cash. They went to VA Software, and had software to make the money -- but now, it's SourceForge, an online media and ecommerce company, so they've gotta keep the eyes looking on their sites so Ali's paychecks won't bounce.
It's sad really, with some folks at Collab saying that they're destroying the Software that they bought from VA, and throwing their platform out the window and adopting the technology that they bought.
Is this "Mindbridge" a real company? I know geeks with 15 servers in their basement...
How can a first post be marked Redundant?
loud squeak heard in Redmond moments ago was the sound of 1,000 chairs flinching.
In soviet Russia, Linux saves a bunch of money by switching to YOU.
If Slashdot had even a shred of interest in maintaining and kind of credibility, they'd note that the "article" that they're linking to is at linux.com. Both are owned by Sourceforge, Inc. (Formerly VA Linux, then OSDN, now Sourceforge). This is nothing but a cheap way to earn more pageviews.
I don't respond to AC's.
To make up the difference, M$ would have to give them the software, pay the electric bill and donate engineering time for custom applications. If you read the article, you will see that the company dropped from at least 60 servers to 15. I say at least, because the only count they give of how much hardware they were using is the 50 or 60 that "were giving them trouble." It's clear that time spent nursing that mess was better spent moving to software that works better and allows easier customization. Their continued good results with other software proves their competence as well as the poor quality of what they were using before. Quality that poor is a bad deal unless it's heavily subsidized, so your imagined extortion can only work for a few prominent customers. When that does work, the rest of the customers will pay that much more to keep M$'s profit to revenue ratio at 35%.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Why don't you just say an "assload of cash" or a "fuckload of Benjamins" or a "metric shit-ton of sweet, sweet greenbacks" or a "Beyonce trunk chock-fulla money, honey"? This is /., not digg. Try to compose a headline that can be parsed by an educated person.
And throw in a semicolon while you're at it.
Do you think this is the only topic where that comment has been made?
Fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more on your operational cost.
Dropping the number of computers needed to do a job by an order of magnitude will save you more than 15%. The time spent nursing sick servers is better spent making new product for more revenue.
When you are big enough, 15% is a big deal. Walmart, for example, has more revenue than any company besides Exxon, but is only able to keep 3% of it. If they were able to drop their costs by 15%, they would have proffits five times M$'s.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Are those metric bunches?
so in soviet russia ....
etc are also mod redundant ?
they should be but they are not
This story has no credibility with me. The article is ridiculously light on details and seems to be an attempt at self-serving cross-promotion. There is no discussion of how they saved money or what those servers are actually doing. They talk about how much is costs them to "support" a Microsoft box, but they're such a small company, it's hard to imagine what their "support" even consists of.
They're a Linux company. They're telling us how great Linux is. They're not giving any details.
Personally, I have quite a bit of experience operating, maintaining, and supporting both Linux and Microsoft servers. I have found that both work well for the vast majority of applications. I've found other people's Linux servers to be easier to support than other people's Microsoft servers, but this might just be because the average Linux server contact is more knowledgeable than the average Microsoft server contact.
One huge difference is that it is *much* easier to figure out what a Linux server is doing and to start analyzing why it's not doing what it's supposed to do.
I don't think there are enough mod points floating around to accomplish that remarkable feat
if there ever were a funny post that would be it
Emphasis mine by the way; the two words in bold appear to be contradictory...or are they?
when you buy from Microsoft, you can assume it works with other Microsoft products.
Assume?! MS is known for all sorts of lock in. Of course their products work with each other! But only the most recent versions, that too is key to MS's overall strategy. It's when you don't want to upgrade or they don't have some need covered that you're out of luck. 3rd party stuff that works with MS is always chancy. Never know when MS might make an internal change and break half the 3rd party stuff as well as old MS stuff.
Can such a person exist? A system administrator who has to get used to the idea of command lines?!
Sounds like the way we wish hiring decisions were made. Sounds too good to be true.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
I couldn't agree more.
When I walk home every day (I can't afford a car, or public transportation) the public shower
me with rose petals, accolades and proclamations of my uber froobiness. Why?
Because by God, Microsoft, Church and Apple Pie I built my PC with Windows Ultimate Edition!
Sure it cost a little more and there was that dark spell where I just ate Ramen noodles
Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and sucked on the salt packets Tuesdays and Thursdays
but dang it I needed the best, the very best OS in the land for my daily diet of Fox News,
posting vociferous rants on right-leaning blogs and stalking the Olsen twins.
Woo! Yay me!
Sorry for heavy offtopic, but WTF is this crap again?! I'm not sure I like someone using two accounts to post on /. (if it's proven, the other side is heard, etc.), but constant personal attacks/trolling like these are plain *stupid* and annoying.
Having lived in silicon valley for several years now, it is not news when a company tosses out Windows boxes and replaces them with Linux boxes as an alternative to buying more Windows licenses (for upgrades or for expanding their collection of systems).
Business as usual is when companies adopt Linux for practical business reasons. It happens all the time in the valley, probably because there are many IT guys here with the experience to manage large networks of Linux, BSD, etc machines.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Well, it's not like you can't run an "Enterprise Business" on 15 servers. I am CTO of a software company servicing school districts in California. We have 70 school districts, hundreds of users and tens of thousands of students in our databases, we make it work with a surprisingly small cluster of 4 4-way Opteron servers, running at just under 5% of capacity. (mid-day load average)
Our annual sales exceed $1 million dollars this year, we've been growing 40% - 70% annually. No, we're not a megacorp, but still quite legit. (and our servers are all 100% Linux)
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
...have never heard of Mindbridge.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Not even a fake "some_slashdot_user writes..." Just a summary+link of a lame article from an OSDN affiliate posted by ScuttleBot.
>If you are a small company like this, and aren't to concerned about security
:)
Are you implying that Linux is inherently less secure than Windows?
I don't think so. A properly administered Linux box is just as secure as a properly administered Windows box.
Please don't spread FUD.
Not implying it... stating it. It's a fact. Windows does file level security far better (which is to say, at all), and network security is non-existant with Linux. It's just a bunch of stuff on a machine, and you go to different machines for different stuff. Completely ad hoc.
No FUD, only educated experience.
Fail.
Company fires IT director, hires new IT director who fires all the worthless IT staff who were responsible for 50-60 (insert OS here) servers that were poorly managed -- hires new IT people (fewer of them) that are competent and set up 15 servers running (insert OS here).
I've see that story dozens of times with the (insert OS here) being Linux or Windows.
Keep you warm and close to the microsoft boosum.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
To anyone who knows Linux (or BSD, or any Unix) it's a no-brainer to run the fast, open, free, fully-configurable stuff.
It's only a legitimately difficult decision to make when a company doesn't have Unix expertise. (Which is often.) Pay the cost to replace your IT staff, or pay the cost to rent software from Microsoft?
I wish people would do cost/benefit analyses on this latter point. After all, everyone knows Unix is cheaper. But is it cheaper than replacing your Win32 GUI point-n-click admins with their Unix replacements? I honestly have no clue... and I suspect it really depends upon the company, the culture, the size, the market, etc.
These "I switched to Linux and I saved money articles" are old and meaningless.
"I switched my career from real-estate to oncology and now I make more money!" Great, but what's the real-world cost of doing so, if it's not already a simple option?
(I'm a multi-platform guy with a hybrid environment at home, so save your breath if you're going to point the Finger of Anti-Linux SentimEnt at me.)
That being said, it's probably a domain controller and an Exchange server.
I would guess you are 100% corrrect about that. But aren't DCs and email servers a very central part of the infrastructure? If those 2 things are still Windows boxes then I'd say there are 2 large and very critical aspects of their infrastructure that rely on Windows servers.
Windows gives you ACLs, Linux gives you standard unix permissions *AND* ACLs...
ACLs are complex, to the point that many windows admins dont bother with them. Unix permissions are simple enough to master but lack some of the flexibility. However, for most purposes permissions are more than adequate, and you also have ACLs if you need more.
But wtf is this about network security? Linux has iptables by default, ssh for communications between machines, NFSv4 for file sharing...
Compare that to windows file sharing, which is vulnerable to reflection attacks (see metasploit) and will automatically send your authentication details when you connect to a remove server!
Not to mention all the stuff windows has open by default (rpc, netbios, netbios-ns, and more), and which is difficult to turn off. Linux boxes, unless horribly misconfigured, will only listen on the services which are required, with unnecessary services turned off rather than kludgily filtered.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
You have GOT to be a troll. Or are you just naive?
I'm guessing he means something along the lines of shared groups, from Active Directory. Two file servers, one group of defined users - set the group allow permission on both servers and add users in AD and they get access on both servers. How do you do that easily on Linux? I'm genuinely curious!
Windows admins who don't bother with ACL's are clearly too dumb to use windows properly, imo..
"The article is ridiculously light on details and seems to be an attempt at self-serving cross-promotion. There is no discussion of how they saved money or what those servers are actually doing"
.. We also use Hyperic to monitor the health and happiness of the servers'
.. :)
'part of this open source initiative, we also chose a virtual machine called Xen, which allows us to put multiple machines on one physical server, to consolidate
"Personally, I have quite a bit of experience operating, maintaining, and supporting both Linux and Microsoft servers. I have found that both work well for the vast majority of applications"
Given the cost of support contracts and the per cpu restrictions of the MS EULA, why would you spend your companies money on licenses. For an average corporation that's one fifth of their annual revenue.
Some more quotes from the light on details article:
"It costs us significantly more to support a Windows box than a Linux box"
"You put out an email to a user mailing list, and you may get a response from the developer. Try doing that with most commercial vendors. It's hard to get access to those people. In the open source world, it's relatively easy"
I can validate this from personal experience, I once got a reply from the lead developers of mpeg4ip, similarly I once received a personal reply from Linus Torvalds. Bill Hilf or billg have yet to reply to my emails
was: This story has no credibility (Score:3, disengenous FUD)
davecb5620@gmail.com
100,000 desktop PCs, 1000 file servers, 500 email servers etc etc.
Really. Think about the mathematics of that situation. Think about the relationships between the machines, work out the complexity. As far as I can see there are a lot of CEOs and CIOs out there who simply can't multiply two numbers together. And if they can't do that...
Deleted
Converts them to 13 Linux servers.
See Microsoft's problem now? See the point?
Say, did you graduate high school? Your reading skills seem to be lacking, it's right there in paragraph 3 of the article. Oh wait! I get it you didn't RTFA and decided to spout of anyway. Oh and the mods, good job there.
As you were.
Deleted
easily is stretching it a bit but kerberos was designed for just that. in fact, AD is just a Borgified kerberos (just enough so it's incompatible with every other krb servers)
Ah, come on Balmer, you can do better than that.
Whenever a positive article about Open Source appears on slashdot, totally ignore the contents, trash the source and question their honesty .. :)
davecb5620@gmail.com
Did you think about all those extra costs like 'client-licenses' or whatever they now are called? Did you think about that Exchange server license? Did you think about all those other applications that you have to buy extra?
With a basic gnu/linux system you can get mailserver/fileserver/webserver/development software all for free, if the knowledge to maintain it internally.. If not the support-contracts for those systems are not that big.. And if you are running gnu/linux on the servers in a company it will be so much easier to migrate workstations too if you don't need any windows-specific applications..
Another few things... Mirrored boot-disks in windows? Don't you have to pay extra to do that in software, if that's even possible? If you want to run virtual servers to reduce the number of machines for non-cpu hungry apps you don't have to buy vmware, just use KVM...
There are MANY benefits with running gnu/linux in a company but it all depends how big it is, and how much knowledge you have internally.
Not bad, but not big enough to be important. I'd like to see a... larger company switching to Linux if it's going to be claimed as news. Don't get me wrong, I prefer Microsoft stuff myself, but saving money when it comes to IT implementations (without resorting to piracy) is a very big plus, especially since you don't really have to look outside of the IT department in most cases to get approval for a change since there's no immediate cost involved.
On a side note, anyone think their two Windows servers are running Exchange?
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Clearly, the open source community does not prescribe to the notion of saving "loads" of money.
Filelevel security? Referring to file-permissions and such? Well then, just go with ACL's and you have the same functionality on a gnu/linux system, or any other *nix OS.
File-sharing... NFSv4 is starting to get very good now but maybe not there yet, so go with NFS and automounter, if you want a bit more security just add a ipsec-tunnel and let you NFS traffic flow... You could probably also add some additional security to this by having the clients use keys stored in the LDAP and received when the user logs in..
Or if you want something with a per-user login you can always go to Samba and use the CIFS protocol...
Network security? Domain user-accounts? Configure the clients and/or the servers with LDAP/Kerberos authentication. If you want you can even configure them to authenticate towards a Windows AD domain...
This is the beauty of such systems.. You can do just about anything your mind can think about, and automate it all in some easy scripts...
We just fixed a quite nice thing in our computer-lab at work, and it is so simple.. Backup and restore of simple system images, and it even works for windows systems..
When we have configured a system we just boot it via PXE and do a dump to a NFS share of all the disks in the system and then we have a good backup.. When we then want to restore a system we just simple boot it again via the PXE and chose restore and it restores everything.. All required for this was one tftp-server/dhcp-server/nfs-server, generic kernel image that supports all the different disk-controllers we are using... Simple embedded ramdisk that enables us to mount a nfs-fs dd the images to disk and about 200 lines of shell-scripting...
Don't bash down on things you don't know much about, at least without having the phrase 'to my knowledge' somewhere in the post..
For Christian, the biggest deal was sysadmins who had to learn Linux.
No, the biggest challenge would have been sysadmins capable of doing basic math.
Now lets see... from 60+ servers to 15 (*), reduction of at least 75%.
((*)15 PHYSICAL servers, plus a few VIRTUAL ones thanks to Xen. Still a significant reduction)
Even if you keep the same admin/server ratio that's a change of admin staff of..... let me do the math.....
To aid the process, Christian looked specifically for new hires who were eager to learn.
Oh yeah... I'd be feeling _real_ good if I was an admin there right now....
NTFS ACLs are far superior to POSIX ACLs, which don't even have real inheritance.
"AD is just a Borgified kerberos"
I'm sorry, but this statement is incorrect.
Active Directory is a Directory Service. Kerberos (or, more properly, Microsoft's implementation of it), is a network authentication protocol.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directory_service
http://web.mit.edu/Kerberos/
Answer: NIS
Got Code?
I'm sure there are cases that running all Linux is cheaper, server-side especially, but I would say that this story in particular is about as credible as any of these - http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/evaluat ion/casestudies/r2casestudies.mspx, and at least the Microsoft "studies" provide figures, and specifics of why they got a saving.
In the complex world of IT, neither closed source nor open-source is the perfect solution for everything.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Another few things... Mirrored boot-disks in windows? Don't you have to pay extra to do that in software, if that's even possible? If you want to run virtual servers to reduce the number of machines for non-cpu hungry apps you don't have to buy vmware, just use KVM...
Mirror disks, RAID 5, etc, all available point and click through the Disk Management. For Virtual Servers you have the FREE Virtual Server 2005 Product as well as Virtual PC if you want to run it locally. Both are just as good if not better than VMWare IMHO. Not picking a side here, just stating some facts....
Having converted most of our servers to Linux from Novell/Microsoft, I can say with confidence that there are savings beyond just hardware, power, Microsoft software and server support hours. The real expense lies in the mindset between the two system architectures. In an open source environment, the goal is to do everything with free software. In a Microsoft environment, the propensity is to buy everything including all the maintenance agreements. _There's_ the killer cost: upgrade and maintenance agreements hold companies hostage to complicated licensing schemes. It's really highway robbery which can sink an IT dept. We have about 140 Microsoft desktops and 25 servers (17 Linux) across 4 offices. By far and away the cost of desktop swamps server by a _huge_ margin. It's pretty sad when a loaded laptop costs more than the server that supports it.
But is it cheaper than replacing your Win32 GUI point-n-click admins with their Unix replacements?
In terms of personnel it's not always fair to compare admins dollar for dollar. If I've got an admin who can run a Linux environment that performs reliably with a minimum of downtime, that person is worth more to me. They are saving me thousands in licensing costs and thousands more in potential headaches. They're saving me from vendor lock-in, which might be worth a lot somewhere down the road. With Linux I can scale at will instead of the headache of trying navigate Microsoft's byzantine license fees and restrictions. How much is that worth?
It's worth a lot of money to me to keep Microsoft out the mix, not all companies see it that way. Like with any commodity, value is a perception based on a point of view.
Then there are the intangibles. A vendor calls with some zippy-dippy piece of software that's going to make my life so much easier. It's so funny to ask, "Does it run on Linux? Because that's all we use here." Used to be that was inevitably followed by a long pause, not as much lately. More companies are answering that they do support Linux. Which has kind of taken some of the fun out of sales calls. "You don't have any Windows servers?"
Hehe. Priceless.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
It's not news to anybody that's competent that Linux can save you money. In my industry (web hosting) I'd say 90% of servers are Linux systems. We do have some Windows servers but that's only because customers ask for them and MS literally bribes us to sell them (free licensing, training, cash, etc.)
In the long run Linux servers are much, much cheaper. We have servers that have been running for over 440 days without an issue and these are Redhat 7.3 servers. No viruses, no worms, no break-ins, nothing. Try putting an NT 4 box online and see what happens.
Nice, but it does not eliminate some of the underlying design problems that make NTFS rather slow and inefficient as a server level file system.
- no journaling to speak of. A power outage can eat or corrupt unsaved data.
- it fragments files (heck, even metadata gets fragmented!)
- no symlinks and other special files.
But even with a modern file system, it would still be a resource hog on any server, because it cannot run without a GUI.
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
The second verse is really excellent, the last line is almost perfect. This is the best Whitman parody I've read in years. Pity I have no mod points.
Pining for the fjords
Enough TCO slashvertisements for companies we've never heard of, please. Ooh, "corporate data monitoring" from a company whose webserver has a three second round trip. I bet we're all kicking to find out what their monthly OS costs were.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
Want to hear the voice of GOD? cat
Windows servers are like rabbits. Those two will keep multiplying and soon they will outnumber the penguins yet again.
"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." - Shepard Book Quoting Malcolm Reynolds
Think of it as a transition drug.
Once she's used to one UNIX desktop, switching to another will be easier.
AD has a directory service part, but i seem to remember microsoft considering it as their whole auth stack, and it uses their borgified krb5 to auth the machines
also, if you want to argue about directory services only, AD is just a borgified ldap with lots of non-standard extensions
Looks like an article that won't likely be published in Microsofts "Highly Reliable Times"
Get the facts!
$0.30 / day for Windows Server licensing? Huh, that's weird, because I could have sworn that quad-processor SQL server I just implemented the other day cost $105,000 to license for Windows Server Enterprise and SQL Server Enterprise (per processor licensing). Even spread over 5 years that's $58 / day, and $96 / day over your three year lifetime. We have a few of those boxes, plus all the application servers and other support servers. Yeah that's pretty cheap, anybody should be able to afford that... NOT.
Wow. Slashdot really needs a moderation option of "-1, Just Plain Wrong".
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
/)
Yea I guess Cisco is a phony made-up company.
A computer costs $300, and the license for the OS is like $200. Plus licenses for Exchange and the file servers, domain controllers, etc you need to support all those desktops. Plus the software and add-ons for Windows cost money while the equivalent ones for linux/bsd/solaris are free.
Some companies do a cost analysis, and occasionally find out it's cheaper to run Linux for their specific situation. Shooting from the hip and saying it's always cheaper or that it's never cheaper is basically the stupidest thing I've heard.
(another AC troll bites the dust)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Yeah, welcome to the world of the twitter stalkers. I noticed these humorless drama-mongering morons about six months ago. I bet they're furries; no-one else can spread pointless drama like furries. (But I kid! I love the furries. Being an old-school comic book geek, I feel kinda protective of the dorklings, like they're my younger brother or something, who's a bit of a perv, and gets picked on a lot.)
Now the twitter-stalkers are convinced that erris is twitter, they're following that account around too.. Based on some pretty flimsy evidence, too. I.E. 1) They both use "M$" which apparently twitter invented (I must have imagined seeing it on FIDOnet back in the early nineties, or maybe that was twitter too OMG!) and 2) He responded to a twitter-attack-post's "Did you even read what I wrote?" with "I did, did you?" which is totally something no third person would EVER say. Or at least if you're unfamiliar with having conversations in English with other human beings, you might believe that. Me, I get out more, and I've seen that kinda construction IRL.
Heh.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
If you are a small company like this, and aren't to concerned about security, going with Linux isn't too bad. Obviously it's not something a large, enterprise level organization, dealing with confidential information (payroll, benefits, HR, etc) can really do anything viable with, but little guys can probably save a few thousand dollars this way.
Right. Morgan Stanley is a small company and that is why they converted most of their servers to RedHat Enterprise Linux. Otherwise, if Morgan Stanley had been a large organization it would have made more sense to build out their server infrastructure totally on Microsoft Windows.
Here's the setup, Installing a Win 2k Server on our intranet for our Windows clients and Freelancers [inwards looking only]. I briefly jumped on the WWW for updates [yes, I know it's not actively supported] having already updated to SP4 manually along with the latest rollup - yada, yada.
/"c: ie6wzrd.exe - something like that).
t s/AutoPatcher.shtml
... Web 2.0 goodness!!!!
:-)
OK, now I've been schooled by some of the best on this particular server - in Seattle, mind you, so I got a pretty good handle on this, but hey, I'm no Mark Russinovich.
So, on this "other OS" I was able to quite easily find all things "Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Server", home page, oodles of info.
Jump on the 2000 Server and off to the download section of MS, [Windows Update and Microsoft Update don't work without IE 6] 20 mins of clicky-clicky and I'm getting nowhere. Weirdly, the word "server" is absent where I'd done the same search earlier on that "other OS".
Three-card Monte:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-card_Monte
Next, IE 6.1 SP1.
The stub doesn't work, [as usual] so I try the Run trick for the full update, ("C\Download\iesetup.exe
Broke.
[not to mention the frequent STOP errors, disk controller errors, etc. on known good hardware]
4 hours on just this. FOR A FUCKING BROWSER UPDATE.
OH LOOK:
Great, some help!
AutoPatcher 2000 August 2007 Core Release & Update:
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/OS-Enhancemen
AutoPatcher description
AutoPatcher 2000 requires Windows 2000 SP4 to be installed (works with Windows 2000 Pro, Server, & Adv. Server)
"August 29, 2007: The development of the Autopatcher project was officially ceased today, when the Microsoft Legal department contacted the Autopatcher team demanding them to put an immediate stop to any further releases. For more details, please read this article."
Classsssy.
Along the way, I got great offers for Windows 2003 Server, lots of links - rich content
Here's the punch line Guys and Gals:
Like Sony - I'm banning Microsoft, Windows and all things Redmond from our office. I've wasted my time before [and we formally quite supporting Windows here], but this is the last time I do this - it's ALL going, lock, stock and barrel, down to the books and the media it resides on, OUT.
I don't have these problems on the "other" servers - period {.}.
I'm ripping this install out and installing Linux or Solaris, fuck it, at least if I have trouble I haven't got people trying to hide the software I need to get the GOD DAMNED thing running.
Thank you for your attention.
I feel MUCH better.
hylas
~hylas
probably because there are many IT guys here with the experience to manage large networks of Linux, BSD, etc machines.
And growing.
It isn't the IT technical types holding up Linux deployment. It is the CIO that likes lobster with MS sales and the people who know nothing of OSes including MS. Maybe a little to do with "bundling". Thought that was illegal, but OK for M$. The last thing I/T wants to do change and learn. Like when the PCs came in, I/T was the last to adopt. When Linux comes in, I/T will be the last to adopt. (Except for some ;))
It would seem that Mindbridge is being run by the fanboys and not the accountants or shareholders.
Let's not bother to actually QUANTIFY "bunches of money" or do any kind of cost/benefits analysis and just make a headline out of it to get some free publicity.
Obviously nobody has done any kind of credible study on the TOTAL cost of ownership. YA, just train a few admins and we're good to go. No extra costs there. Sure, customers want Microsoft, and we'll give it to them if they want to pay extra. We don't need no steenkin' TCO analysis -- we just KNOW we are saving BUNCHES of money.
This kind of drivel makes both the Linux fanboys and Californians look bad.
Mindbridge most likely had problems managing their Windows servers because they were unskilled in Active Directory, Group Policy and the dozens of other management, maintenance and administration tools provided out of the box. Check the latest reports on what the majority of Fortune 1000 companies run on both their public AND internal servers.
Maybe if they had taken some of those "bunches of money" and invested them in real training, they'd be singing a different tune now.
You gotta wonder when you hear stuff like this...
Opinions count as facts? Do you know what IMHO means?
It's easier for guys with MBAs to trust others who also have MBAs rather than dirty hippies from engineering schools.
But when it all boils down to it, a good CIO will switch to any technology if he can be convinced that it saves him money, time and improves reliability (and therefor the perception that he is doing a good job).
As long as he doesn't have to give up the machine on his desktop that took him 5 years to figure out how to open up a spreadsheet. (you can train any animal to do almost any trivial task). Or whatever other reason, valid or invalid, that he has for keeping Windows machines on the desktops of marketing and executives. hardly matters, I don't really care about the whole Linux isn't ready for the desktop debate. I just want servers where we can have a community audit the code, and provide us free patches and enhancements while just paying a few smart IT guys a bit more money and paying MS a lot less money.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
did you fill out those tps reports early, with the new cover letter?
I remember working for a software and hardware reseller two years ago and had to do a cusat. survey over the phone. One of the sets of questions was type of server(s) they were running and one guy I managed to get the survey done was pretty cool and was a linux and windows user. He was the only one I interviewed running solely on linux boxes. I asked (as part of the survey as well as personal interest and intrigue) as to why he wasn't using Windows boxes for server activity across the board. "Simple. Why the hell would I want to spend 90% more on Windows servers and its licensing when I can do the same for 1/10th the cost and all the more control over operations and efficiency?" In short: if/when you learn to manage linux for your rig, you save money in the long run as well as the sense of accoplishment. In short again: kudos to the comp. for switching to linux. the investment now in it will definitely pay off.
If anyone needs me, I'll be in the Angry Dome.
Is not Virtual Server a software you run on top of windows? So then you still have to buy a windows license for that, and if you are going to be running virtual machines you probably want a few more cpu's in the box.. Don't that cost extra too?
:D
VMWare ESX is a standalone OS that gives you almost the full performance of the actual hardware without having a underlying OS doing all sorts of stuff that will slow down the virtual-machines..
And IMHO all disk-management in windows is crap... If you want to take that route... Facts count, opinions don't.
Another few things that you can do in GNU/Linux...
- On the fly addition of disks into a raid5.
- On the fly file-system expansion.
- Raid5 on partitions, create a 10Gb partition on each disk and create a raid5 on those and use the rest of the diskspace as unsecure storage for tmp files or whatever.
- Free and good iscsi targets/initiators that you even can use to boot the servers via. Ie no per-machine disk-config.. If you want a bit more security then have 2 iscsi servers that you mirror the data between. Possible in windows, but then you need to buy those extras again..
- And it's all 'free' and included in the basic OS-support if you buy support from somewhere.
Redhat, as an example, supports all applications they deliver on the install cd's... With MS you have to buy almost everything extra, or at least buy the support extra.
But there is a BIG downside with all of this too... Too much freedom is hell, at least for us that have to help customers get the things going, or implement the setup they wanted... Things can get COMPLEX when they start listing feature after feature that they just have read about...