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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 ?
press release news posted to slashdot = gayest shit ever.
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.
Is this "Mindbridge" a real company? I know geeks with 15 servers in their basement...
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$'s profit to revenue ratio at 35%.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Why don't you just say an "assload of cash" or a "fuckload of Benjamins" or a "metric shit-ton of sweet, sweet greenbacks" or a "Beyonce trunk chock-fulla money, honey"? This is /., not digg. Try to compose a headline that can be parsed by an educated person.
And throw in a semicolon while you're at it.
Why stop at switching to Linux?
1. Buy a Skoda.
2. Live in a trailer.
3. Shave on alternate days.
Yes, you too can save money by cutting out luxury items built to last. Put your money into a savings account over the next 50 years, retire, and live the life of a billionaire in the little time that remains. Buy a yacht and sail around the world with a whole bunch of smooth skinned, young, and beautiful girls. You'll be too tired and shrivelled to fuck them but they sure look purty. Alternatively, you can keep the economy afloat and live a rich and full life while you still can.
Microsoft Windows. Tomorrows Happiness, Today....
Fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more on your operational cost.
Dropping the number of computers needed to do a job by an order of magnitude will save you more than 15%. The time spent nursing sick servers is better spent making new product for more revenue.
When you are big enough, 15% is a big deal. Walmart, for example, has more revenue than any company besides Exxon, but is only able to keep 3% of it. If they were able to drop their costs by 15%, they would have proffits five times M$'s.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Are those metric bunches?
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.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=280723&cid=20
Still trolling Slashdot for fun and profit?
Emphasis mine by the way; the two words in bold appear to be contradictory...or are they?
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.
When you are a small business, every little bit helps. Personally, I'm not sure I would risk it, but that's likely just because I'm so aware of these kinds of risks. The real shame is how few organizations take security into consideration on just about anything. Sometimes, it's better to spend money as insurance against bad things happening, but then again the CEO gets paid even if the servers are wide open to everyone on the network.
Take a look at the city of Munich: they are like 5 years in to having their total IT infrastucture screwed over... and yet the project managers are still drawing paychecks. I guess another facet is how organizations with a low amount of accountability can do these kinds of things.
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"
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.
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.
"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
If a "company" cannot afford a Windows license, it probably is a Linux "company", as in not a real company, but a phony, made-up company. The cost to license a machine for $300 for three years (average expected lifetime - about 30 cents! a day) is paltry to a real business that makes money.
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
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.
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....
...some other company switched from Linux servers to Windows and saved "bunches of money", too.
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();
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.
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
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.
Looks like an article that won't likely be published in Microsofts "Highly Reliable Times"
Get the facts!
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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...
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.