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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.
Is this "Mindbridge" a real company? I know geeks with 15 servers in their basement...
No, you'll really hear the chairs moving and flinching when Linux gets to the point that it is so easy to operate that my IT-retarded mom can use it with the same ease that she is used to on her XP (forgetting the problems that I come over to her house to fix), and the video drivers work better across the board (*COatiUGH*, *COnvidiaUGH*). However, I must say the last fedora I saw was a good step in that direction...
Cue Linux Missionaries starting to mod me down as a troll in 3..2..1..
"Thank you for using Stop-n-Drop, America's favorite suicide booth since 2008"
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$'s profit to revenue ratio at 35%.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more on your operational cost.
Dropping the number of computers needed to do a job by an order of magnitude will save you more than 15%. The time spent nursing sick servers is better spent making new product for more revenue.
When you are big enough, 15% is a big deal. Walmart, for example, has more revenue than any company besides Exxon, but is only able to keep 3% of it. If they were able to drop their costs by 15%, they would have proffits five times M$'s.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Are those metric bunches?
'However, I must say the last fedora I saw was a good step in that direction...'
You need to see Ubuntu, using fedora is akin to jamming icicles in your eyes using only a toothpick for grip in comparison. As for video drivers, nvidia are easy enough, in ubuntu it takes two clicks to install the commercial drivers. ATI drivers still suck but yesterday or the day before there was an announcement that AMD is going to completely open the specs on the ATI drivers that means there will be fully optimized and functional 3D accelerated drivers that load out of the box. That beats windows where you have to go to the website and hunt out the drivers for any modern card.
Seriously, Ubuntu is ready for USE by your average user already. It isn't ready for administration by your average user but your average user doesn't know enough about the system to competently complete administration tasks even if they are made easy enough to click through.
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.
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"
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.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.)
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!
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)
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..
Yes, the issue is not so simple. It really depends upon the company, its situation in the market, and the like. But, generally speaking there is significant cost savings in using some things as open source. In the case of a small contract call center in my area, open source was the saving grace for the company. Their IT overhead was so great that the company felt it could not longer be competitive and was considering closing doors. Indeed, the IT department shrank to three people. But these three intrepid people replaced the proprietary Nortel Telephone system that was bleeding them dry on maintenance, support, and just plain babysitting with two Asterisk servers and SNOM telephones. The second largest expense was on the maintenance of their exchange server. So, exchange was phased out in favor of Zimbra. Zimbra was brought online in a week's time and has seen 99.999% uptime with only looking at the logs once a week versus babysitting an exchange server every day. This is not some case study, this is my friend that achieved remarkable results. Asterisk and Zimbra have put this call center back in the black. My friend does see some merits to proprietary, i.e. Active Directory. Simply put, he needs it to adaquetaly manage his workstations. He thinks once Samba4 hits a release, there is potential for phasing out the windows domain controllers. Soon, Windows will be relegated to a SQL server. My friend says that programmers are working furiously to convert to an *AMP solution.
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
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
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
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
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...