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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.'"
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.
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...
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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
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