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AMD's 12-Core Chip Cuts Software Licensing Costs
CWmike writes "AMD released on Monday its 12-core chip code-named Magny-Cours, doubling the number of cores over the previous-generation Opteron chip. While a doubling of performance is nice, another key benefit delivered by a chip with a dozen cores may be in reducing software costs. For Matt Lavallee, director of technology at MLS Property Information Network, a company that supplies real estate data, upgrading to the 12-core Opteron chip from his current quad-core chips will allow him to cut the number of servers — and his software licensing fees. While the 12-core chip costs a little more than an eight-core chip, it's 'nowhere near as much as a SQL server costs,' said Lavallee, who has been beta-testing the new chips. MLS operates 60 servers, and Lavallee said he could theoretically cut the number of servers by half but will likely reduce his server count by a third with the chip upgrade."
Reader adeelershad82 adds that AMD is hoping the new Opterons will compete with Intel in the high-volume server market.
And the fee for linux is the cost of the admins -- the people who are good in the environment know they are good and their price goes up every year -- it takes about three years to become really proficient at most MS products - it might take half a year to really understand the linux environment and methodology if you are unfamiliar and then another 4 - 5 to gain that same profiencency equivalent.
Interestingly, I work for a company where the IT-department is a pure Microsoft-shop. Only windows-hosting and almost only C#-development for internal applications. In the technology department however, we operate a bunch of production-system for our customers, running mostly CentOS Linux. Lately, I've discovered that the Linux-admin-staff often writes simple script-solutions with their left hand, with equivalent complexity to systems written by trained developer in the IT department. And even though I personally often would rather see a more structured systematic approach to some problems, when listening to the end-users they almost always perceive they've gotten BETTER support and reliability from those scripts.
Point being that, a Linux-admin MAY cost a bit more than a windows-admin, and the learning-period might certainly be a bit longer, but I see much more productivity coming out of our Linux-crew than the windows-equivalent. More services hosted and administered per admin, and ~10 times the operational availability. Also, when more complex jobs needs being done (configuring network device, someone needs help with a tricky SQL query for a report, or needs someone to mirror a huge chunk of text-files into a searchable DB for performance), they usually come to the Linux-crew than the windows IS/IT.
What I will give the person who goes the linux route is that once you are profiecient in Linux - gaining the same proficeincy in other systems is cake - basically because the they are just easier to use in the first place.
Definitely matter of oppinion. Personally, I've never found anything "easy" about windows. Sure, the very limited amount of things you can do within three button-presses is usually simple enough (interestingly the same goes for modern Linux Desktops/Simple Server Setups). However, once something breaks, or you need/desire to stride outside the comfy gui-box, just forget about it. (IMHO) For example, a standard CentOS5 server install comes with high-availability software that from commercial vendors (IBM and HP, I don't know if Microsoft can even match the fully distributed transactional storage components) START at ~100K euro. For those money, I can let one high-school self-taught Linux hacker spend 2 years in researching and fine-tuning for the JUST the entrance fees of the proprietary variant. How would you estimate my chances of getting some more use out of that admin meanwhile?