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Munich's Move To Linux Exceeds Target
jrepin writes "In May 2003, Munich's city council resolved to migrate municipal workstations from Windows to Linux and open source. Munich's LiMux project has announced that it has exceeded its annual target for migrating the city's PCs to its LiMux client. To date in 2011, the project has migrated 9,000 systems; it had originally planned to migrate 8,500 of the 12,000-15,000 PC workstations used by city officials in Munich."
And if the CEO of RedHat didn't travel to Munich to convince the city to convert to RedHat, he's an idiot.
Je ne parle pas francais.
Prior to 2003 they were perfectly happy with using windows.
After Balmer's trip.. Wholly shit we have to switch to ANYTHING ELSE ASAP.
Photo from said trip
http://www.models.hr/models/images/stories/slike/najbogatiji/steve_ballmer.jpg
I heard several Munich city officials were later admitted to hospital with chair-related injuries
I was expecting the parent to be goatse, but no, it's actually Ballmer, which is probably more offending to the eye than goatse.
Monstar L
It's still Gotse, but a different angle
The licenses do not tend to be much of a saving but once you have fired the 200+ college drop outs that are looking after the Windows computers and hired 40 people that actually know what they are doing you can save a lot on salaries and the reliability of the system causes a massive saving indirectly. I saw this in reverse several times when places that I dealt with replaced their Sun systems with Windows and had to take on loads of teenagers with a piece of college paper and no idea of how DHCP should be set up. Down times jumped from less than an hour a year to days per year.
But at least the staff could see the acne ridden youths working, they never believed that the old guys with beards and tank tops did anything as the system just worked...
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
http://www.muenchen.de/Rathaus/dir/limux/english/index.html
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
He says that 1,000 staff had been maintaining 15,000 Windows computers. Fifteen computers per tech? Not impressive, by an order of magnitude.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
So the fact that they were not able to provide a demonstration did not ring a few bells? LOUDLY?
I guess the company got what they deserved, then.
As a Munich user, I can tell you that:
The Finance Databases are always available (they previously had significant down-time).
Log-in takes seconds (not the tens of minutes that previously happened with the Windows systems) - the accumulated savings in work time are huge for log-in alone!
Applications load and run faster - again saving workers significant time.
E-mail always works (the Windows mail servers were frequently unavailable).
Security is enhanced, and there are no panicked messages sent around about this week's virus!
It's just MUCH better and lets us all get our work done more easily. The savings in time, user frustration and in software licences is massive. The staff requirements to maintain the system are fewer, better able people. We've just demonstrated our system to a numer of other cities, and many more are going to adopt it...
The amount of computers I can personally maintain could be as high as thousands or as low as one. All depends on what your requirements are.
For example suppose my job is to do nothing but maintain the systems in working order. I don't help users with problems at all, I just make sure the computers and software works properly. I'm allowed total control, all systems are one make and model and are under warranty at all times, they are replaced when they fall out. They all run a single, unified, set of software, none of it custom. Users have no admin access, all data is stored on a highly reliable, supported, central server.
Well hell in that situation, I can maintain a virtually unlimited number of systems myself. Only real limit is in terms of how often hardware fails and I have to diagnose it and call in warranty support (who will do the actual repairs). Highly reliable central equipment that is supported by the company combined with management software like Ghost mean that I'll do things once and replicate it everywhere.
Now on the other end of the scale, suppose I am expected to provide extremely hands on support. Each and every computer is custom built to the user's wishes, both hardware and software. They get it setup however they want. They also have full and complete admin access. Plus, I am expected to handle any questions or training they have. In that case, I'm not going to be able to handle many systems. 15 might well be too many. I'm going to have to spend a lot of time per system helping people, fixing their fuckups, and so on. I'll hit my limit at a low number of systems.
So it is all in what you want. The more service you want, the more staff you need. We go through that with the Dean at work all the time. He wants us to make faculty happy, which means lots of handholding and support for special research projects, but he doesn't want to spend a lot and hire a lot of staff. We have to keep explaining that you can't have it both ways.
Now they may well have had some inefficiency as well, but part of it can just be a very extensive amount of support. If your support team has a lot of jobs, they need a lot of people.
If they were smart, $200.00 base PC's netbooting from a central server.
Doing this with linux = support heaven. Weneed to update Libre Office? ok, 20 minutes later it's done for ALL MACHINES.
Update the OS for security issues? Ok, 1 hour later ALL MACHINES are now up to date.
Push out a new application.... the same.
etc...
Plus a dead workstation is a 10 minute fix. replace the box with a new one, power it on. I can fix a exploded desktop computer while the person is on a smoke break.
Lost documents? don't exist, they all are on the servers and backed up regularly. with an advantage that is hard to achieve in windows. If a user deletes a file, It's still there in the repository. in fact all changes are saved there as well. so a disgruntled employee has zero damage impact capability.
For 80% of the staff and executives this system works perfectly. the 20% which are IT staff, engineers, and Programmers they have their own separate stand alone desktops and/or laptops. All the IT staff have both, a Thin client on their desk and a stand alone laptop.
Number of high power servers dropped from 8 to 5 when we switched, we no longer need a stupid powerful exchange server so that was re-purposed as a application server. and we have a hot backup application server as well.
If you have ran a Citrix farm, it's much like that except easier. the servers need a buttload of ram and fast drives, but configurations allow the thin clients to take advantage of local ram and processor+video. so the browsers, java, and other processor wasting apps run locally to the thin client but store all data to the server and load from the image.
It required competent IT admins though, so we pay 2X the typical MS drone rate, but have 5X less employees in IT to deal with every possible issue.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Well anyone who has seen Steve Ballmer hooting like a madman while leaving sweat pools across the stage would know that Ballmer is waaaay more offensive than Goatse. Frankly i think he makes the Pepsi guy that ran Apple look like a fricking genius.You know its bad when Gates actually had to come out and say "I'm not coming back to MSFT, quit with the rumors already' because so many are unhappy with Ballmer they were hoping for a Jobs style saving of the company.
As for TFA its nice to see that some that try switching aren't doing it for the WRONG reasons, because they always seem to lead to failure. if you want to switch to Linux because its open? Because it lets YOU decide how long support will last? Because it allows you to look at and modify the code to suit YOUR needs? Congratulations you have switched for the RIGHT reasons and will most likely succeed. Where you see Linux fail time and time again is at these companies where they only care about "free as in beer" and they quickly find out that if all you want Linux for is to save money you are gonna lose and lose big.
Lets face it folks Linux isn't gonna save you a dime, not in the short or medium term anyway. You are gonna need more expensive Linux admins instead of dirt cheap MCSEs, you are gonna have to hire developers to code FOSS versions of any and all niche programs you have, you are gonna have to pay people to get your files out of proprietary formats and into FOSS ones, its not gonna be cheap friends. That is why the ones that ONLY care about price are doomed to fail, as when they don't see their budgets magically drop by half and in fact see costs initially rise they are gonna bail.
But if you do it for the right reasons listed above you will stick with it and end up probably better off than you were before since you won't be tied into any products by proprietary vendors like Adobe or MSFT and buy hiring internal coders and admins will be able to DIY instead of going out and buying solutions that will have to be re-bought when the support date ends.
So its nice to see someone looking like they are gonna have a happy outcome by doing it for the right reasons after all the stories we have seen of Linux being used for the wrong reasons and failing. I bet if you looked at their budget they probably haven't saved squat yet and possibly have even had the price go up as they have paid for all of the above that I listed, but they now have more control and can pay to have it customized any way they desire.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Just info for younger people on /.
In terms of large agencies that tried moving to Linux there were 3 main groups of companies
1) Companies that never had developed a Windows culture. Generally they were Unix shops (Sun, Sco primarily) and they were able to move to Linux easily.
2) Companies that were highly motivated tech companies: IBM, Oracle, Sun that all had a Windows culture. They had embarrassing failures in moving to Windows.
3) Companies that were not particularly technological and wanted to save money. The bag was mixed here but in general the costs got out of control and they threw in the towel.
Munich represents the one place where despite going way over time and budget they have kept plowing away. Demonstrating what it is actually going to take to move a large enterprise with a Windows culture over to Linux.
So 9000 copies of Windows not bought. Let's say that save you $50 per machine (perhaps less) at OEM pricing. tha'ts $450,000. Now how many linux techs did they hire to maintain this? Id assume at least 1 for every 100 machines and what is their annual salary? Compared to windows techs, linux techs get more money.
It is true that Linux admins cost more money but you need fewer Linux admins for the same number of workstations so there is an overall savings.