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IBM Reports Indicate Linux TCO Is Lower
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu Sep 01, 2005 09:58 AM
from the total-cost-of-ownership-rules dept.
from the total-cost-of-ownership-rules dept.
Tontoman writes "Information Week reports that
two research reports sponsored by IBM argue that Linux is less expensive to buy and operate than Windows or Unix. The first, a Robert Frances Group study, concluded: 'Linux is 40% less expensive than a comparable x86-based Windows server and 54% less than a comparable Sparc-based Solaris server. The Linux server's costs were $40,149, compared with $67,559 for Windows and $86,478 for Solaris.' The second, a Pund-IT report, titled 'Beyond TCO--The Unanticipated Second Stage Benefits Of Linux,' indicates that 'Linux is enormously popular among IT staff members, many of whom are at the beginning of their careers, as well as with IT educators in universities and technical institutions worldwide.' This has resulted in Linux playing a significant role in the recruitment and retention of IT staff and managers."
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but but (Score:2, Funny)
Don't believe either of them (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Don't believe either of them (Score:3, Insightful)
Personnaly, I find haveing software dictate business methods oppressive so I rolled-my-own.
Re:Don't believe either of them (Score:3, Informative)
OBTW I'm a one man denture lab and my formal programming was in Fortran, Basic, and Cobol, my app tracks due dates, does invoices and statements in LAMP, everything I've looked at was bloated over-kill, or didn't do one of my requirements without cut and past
Re:but but (Score:5, Funny)
Colonel Gates: No vone escapes from Stalag XP!
Torvald: Hah! We have a far lower TCO. We don't need your virus-laden operating system.
Colonel Gates: Tell him, Ballmer!
Major Ballmer: I know nothink!
Colonel Gates: Torvald! Nothing can stop Vindows now! Ve have unstoppable software!
Torvald: You'll have to hold on a second, I think Major Ballmer thinks your desk is apple strudel.
Colonel Gates: Relax, Torvald, Major Ballmer is simply practicing for ze next trade show. He's hoping to injest ze vile Steve Jobs. NOw, back to your Linux. It is bad, and smelly, and costly, and is made by Communists!
Parent
TCO vs. HMO (Score:5, Funny)
Re:TCO vs. HMO (Score:3, Funny)
Except that it seems report doesn't cover this topic in its full extension. They forgot to calculate desk damage
a couple of surprises in article (Score:5, Interesting)
From the article:
I am not surprised at linux's lower cost, I am surprised Solaris was so high. Other than Sun's high licensing costs I'm at a loss on why Solaris would be so much higher. I've read other studies and I tend to find them credible that one of the biggest cost-savings in TCO is the manageability of a unix-like system vs the Windows GUI approach. I've seen narratives where good unix administrators can sometimes manage at least twice as many systems as good Windows administrators, sometimes more. This is largely because of the simplicity embedded in the unix complexity (one of the biggest complaints I see about unix is its "too-hard" nature, but when mastered my experience has been you can script and automate so many unexpected scenarios easily, something not so readily available in Windows).
The second surprise for me, also from the article:
It's encouraging to note linux is enormously popular among IT staff. Maybe unix and linux have more purchase on the IT world than we thought. I'd resigned my professional life to watching the MS juggernaut conquer the technology world but maybe the unix paradigm has legs! (There are other equally interesting "better" architectures, (Be, Plan 9) but probably are in the wrong place at the wrong time to gain much mindshare.)
(As an aside, have you ever noticed, the admin energies for Windows' environments goes to keeping the system running in as stable a manner as possible, while admin energies for unix's go to extending and enhancing the systems' performance, sometimes in elegantly exotic ways? Just my $.02)
My guess is (Score:5, Interesting)
My guess would be:
Parent
Re:My guess is (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:My guess is (Score:3, Insightful)
This is brining the admin cost of Linux down to the point where Windows admins were a few years ago when everyone got their MCSE.
Re:My guess is (Score:5, Insightful)
1. Nobody knows how to use it, everybody coming out of school these days is used to using Linux and/or BSD, from this perspective Solaris does a lot of weird things for no reason.
2. Much as Sun's pushing Solaris/x86, if you're using Solaris, you're still pretty much going to be using expensive, locked-in Sun hardware. (Of course that hardware is probably more reliable, but sometimes lower TCO means you get what you pay for).
3. Sun is a competitor to IBM who commissioned the study, maybe the study misrepresents Sun TCO in some way.
Sparcstations are just too reliable. We have machines from 1991 running NIS+ and some other stuff. No manager making a purchase decision is ever going to believe that a server will run for 15 years without a glitch, and he is not going to spread the TCO over 15 years. Nobody in the organization is qualified to touch the machines, and many of the windows system admins who have taken over don't even know they exist.
The windows admins occasionally screw up the network (like when they made the NIS+ servers unreachable by changing the IP numbers of the only two sparcstations allowed to access them), and then we immediately hire an expensive external admin to solve the problem.
Lessons:
- Sun hardware is too reliable: the machines will be technologically obsolete before they fail. Sun can save costs there, because nobody appreciates it anyway unless they are building a spacecraft or nuclear power plant.
- Comparing an x86 machine against a sparcstation based on a lifespan of 5 years is completely unfair. We spend an expensive two weeks configuring a new sparcstation, and then let it run for 15 years. The Windows machines are tinkered with all the time by cheap Windows idiots. The sparcstation gets cheaper as time progresses (if Windows administrators cannot interfere with its operation).
- What about the costs of letting Windows idiots tinker with your infrastructure all the time? THEY are the ones that create the problems for the sparcstations in our organization because they don't know what they are doing.
Parent
Re:My guess is (Score:4, Insightful)
"Nobody in the organization is qualified to touch the machines, and many of the windows system admins who have taken over don't even know they exist.
The windows admins occasionally screw up the network...and then we immediately hire an expensive external admin to solve the problem."
In other words, you have obsolete machines running critical processes that no one knows how to maintain, so you have to hire external people to solve it.
This is what will happen to Windows or Linux or any other OS if you let "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" rule for too long. (Of course, Windows won't last that long anyway, but that's another issue.)
Just because something works doesn't mean it's not obsolescent. I don't care what it's doing, a fifteen-year-old machine is obsolete NOW.
In other words, it's incompetent management that is the problem, not the OS.
Parent
Re:My guess is (Score:5, Insightful)
The hardware may be obselete, but if it is still doing the job you replace it when it fails (or ideally just before). Not having a replacement plan could be an issue, and I suspect these people don't.
The idea there is some perpetual upgrade path we all must walk is a myth created by the IT industry to keep sales figures high, and sustained in part by bad software engineering.
It isn't even obvious they have a management issue, just because they get outside help to sort problems on the boxes, if they only have an issue every few years it is cheaper not to employ the expertise.
I've had 10 year old systems fail whilst still under vendor support contracts, fixed and returned to service inside 24 hours, why should we have replaced them if the economics didn't justify it?
Parent
Re:My guess is (Score:3, Insightful)
A agree with you, or at least a nuance of your argument.
A system is more than the bolts and bytes that goes into it, it's the service it provides to those that use it. The real obsolesence is the deterioration of the knowledge of what service that machine provides, how that machine does it and who is qualified to admin that machine. IT management show regularly review
Re:My guess is (Score:3, Informative)
1) The hardware is DAMN expensive. If you don't have sufficient support, you're paying through the nose for replacement parts. We're talking $3000 for memory. That's three thousand here. For a single DIMM. Gets really nasty when some of the mid-sized servers take 40 such DIMM's.
2) The support for servers is ALSO damn expensive. Talking Platinum service? Get our your wallet. They're 'ni
Re:a couple of surprises in article (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is that after a certain point, it becomes difficult to figure out complex issues. When bugs pop up, it's hard to know whether it's the software's fault or your own, with no good way to peek under the hood. When trying to extend beyond an application's capabilities, you start running into hard-coded issues that make it difficult or impossible.
We're currently migrating to ASP.Net and having internal struggles about whether or not to use Visual Studio, for example. I personally dislike being hampered by the interface, though it makes certain things much easier. The catch is that you need this bulky environment in order to work with what you create, you can't easily edit things outside of the environment, and often the application creates code for you that isn't quite what you want.
So, I'm not sure there's a clear TCO value for these sort of things. Each OS and application probably needs to be evaluated for what you're trying to do. My guess is that there will be a mix of the two systems for a long time into the future. Competition is good.
Parent
That deserves an +5,Insightful (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is that after a certain point, it becomes difficult to figure out complex issues. When bugs pop up, it's hard to know whether it's the software's fault or your own, with no good way to peek under the hood.
Exactly my experience, and I'd like to add that Microsoft online help tends to be similar:
Basic tasks are well explained, but once you need help with complex issues, the approach of "open this window and click that button" breaks down. At this point you need information about how the application works, and that is usually absent in the help files. If you are lucky, you can find it online in the MSDN, but even that tends towards pre-formulated solutions.
Parent
Re:a couple of surprises in article (Score:5, Insightful)
Summed up as:
Windows makes easy things easier and hard things harder. Where as Unix makes hard thigns easier but easy things harder.
Windows low cost of entry expensave maintance, unix high cost of entry, lower maintance.
Parent
Re:a couple of surprises in article (Score:3, Informative)
My experience tells me that every attempt to flatten a learning curve at the beginning results in a steeper gradient that must be overcome later.
The really steep learning curves are practically indistinguishable from brick walls:)
Re:a couple of surprises in article (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know too many text editors that DON'T have most of those features, albeit some of them may not as fully support ASP.Net.
The issue then becomes which IDE allows getting under the hood while still providing sufficient automation to enable productivity.
Meanwhile, the main point of the OP's comment was that a GUI (and by extension, closed source) conceals one's lack of direct knowledge of what is going on - knowledge that becomes critical when something goes wrong.
It's constantly true on Windows - something doesn't react the way you expected. On Linux, you can look at a config file. On Windows, you can't look at anything but some checkboxes scattered over half a dozen different dialogues and menu options. The only way to figure anything out is to step up to the next level and reconsider the entire process you're trying to do - essentially relearning the Windows interface for the process every time. Why? Because in fact it's terribly complicated. The GUI just makes it SEEM simple.
I keep telling people this, but they don't listen: Windows is totally NON-intuitive. It's operation is incredibly complicated and deliberately so - first, because it's Microsoft's way to use "featuritus" to lock in its customers, and second, because Microsoft has no clue how to make anything simple.
People think Windows is easy to use because you can point and click to copy a file or something. That's trivial. Try running one of their servers. Try even understanding Active Directory, or Group Policy interactions between the several different types of groups allowed. It's a conceptual nightmare.
Parent
Re:a couple of surprises in article (Score:5, Insightful)
Once Linux / Unix / Windows / Any OS has a massive failure - it is complicated to troubleshoot and you need knowledge of how the server and applications work. It's a conceptual nightmare.
In other words - if you talk to a good Windows admin they'll think that the Linux system is a conceptual nightmare because they're used to Windows. If you talk to a *nix admin they'll tell you Windows is a conceptual nightmare because they're used to *nix.
Basically if you don't know the underlying architecture in either system and try and just fake things by guessing - you're not going to get far in a real problem situation. I don't see that as a benefit or drawback of Linux/Windows - just a fact of life. Good administrators have a lot of knowledge about their systems and environment.
Parent
Salary (Score:3, Insightful)
It could also be that because Unix is perceived to be a "big busness" operating system, companies are wil
Scripting in windows. (Score:3, Interesting)
proprietary Unix is expensive (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:a couple of surprises in article (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, how strange is that. It's a collaborative effort, you can tell how it works (instead of guessing at wtf windows is doing), it's free as in beer and in speech and it has some ideals (or at the very least, ideals assigned to it).
Windows is only an ideal in the "I want to be just as rich as Bill Gates" kind of way. It's when idealism meets reality and it is about putting food on the table that IT staff go with Windows.
It's like asking a
Re:a couple of surprises in article (Score:3, Insightful)
Part of being the right tool is being one that the IT staff knows how to use, or that you can easily hire staff to use. So in a way it is a popularity contest. And while it may be cool among CTOs to have comtempt for the opinions of your IT staff, it might be that they actually have a good reason for liking what they do.
Interesting Way to Jab at Both Sun and MS (Score:5, Interesting)
see .pdf (Score:5, Informative)
Imagine that... (Score:5, Insightful)
Competition drives prices down...who'd of thought...
A review with numbers! (Score:5, Interesting)
What I really want to see, though, is an item-by-item document included for download which shows what they included in their TCO estimate. Statistics and numbers are fine, if you can read the whole dataset for yourself.
How is this news? (Score:4, Insightful)
IMO a well-run organization will have a hybrid environment.
That being said, it is useful for planning purposes to know in which situations Linux TCO beats Windows and vice versa.
Re:How is this news? (Score:3, Insightful)
If every business has different needs why do you think they should all go with a hybrid environment?
How do you calculate ? (Score:3, Interesting)
(a) Maintenance costs
(b) Support and systems administration costs
(c) Application-server support and system administration costs.
Are these really fixed costs ?
Whilst I agree with this... (Score:5, Insightful)
What about (Score:4, Interesting)
Tm
Bullshit research (Score:4, Insightful)
It's the same as Microsoft "research"; 100% pure marketing drivel.
Re:Bullshit research (Score:3, Insightful)
IBM makes money delivering whatever the customer says they want. IBM has been slowly divulging all their inovative research division for years, and has slowly been settling into a services organization, ie. we'll come in and setup whatever system you like. If you don't know what you want, we'll help you design a system. Their biggest
Why do I get the feeling... (Score:5, Insightful)
Folks : if you treat any of these studies as anything other than another form of advertising, you're a fool.
Re:Why do I get the feeling... (Score:3, Insightful)
While you're certainly right about the /. reception, it is worth pointing out that IBM makes a heck of a lot of money pushing Windows-based solutions. Sure, they're biased, but they're no Microsoft.
c.
WTF? (Score:5, Informative)
Cost of parts: 10K
Cost of labour: two people x two weeks x 900/week = 3600$
Other costs [power/netaccess]: trivial
So for [round up] 15K we bought, assembled, built, installed and setup 8 boxes. that's a cost of roughly 2K each.
Whoopy doo.
Where the hell does 43K/yr come from? Is that the cost of the employee as well?
Well the guy we did hire to manage this, had we planned on keeping him would cost ~60K/yr which when you split over the 32 boxes in the office is trivial.
And we don't have to buy server license upgrades or what not. So really the cost of ownership above the staffer we would have had to have anyways is ZERO. Not 43K/yr.
Tom
Re:WTF? (Score:3, Informative)
It would include staff, and enterprises like banks tend to pay more for their staff than many smaller orgs.
It would include licence costs, and Linux can save you a fortune in licences. We've got a 2 CPU DL380 here that replaced a 4CPU Sun server. This means that our Oracle licences are cheaper, our monitoring software licences are cheaper and our Veritas licences are cheaper.
In an enterprise data centre there are lots of other costs that are amortised a
Re:WTF? (Score:3, Interesting)
So True (Score:4, Insightful)
That statement is so true. Back in college, we all developed on Linux environment because: 1. Our professors were old school and know Unix and C. 2. More importantly, we can get down into the nuts and bolts of the OS. It really helps when you're taking a class on OS. My friend and I wrote a 2 line Perl script to create and kill process one after another just to see how Linux will handle process IDs wrapping around and basing our design decision on that (part of it is also the Geek factor to see what happens). 3. Linux and open source tools are freely available.
Now at work, most of the younger developers and IT staffers are also Linux users. MS haven't done so well in winning the hearts and minds of the next generation.
Great, just what we need... (Score:3, Funny)
I don't know about elsewhere, but the IT staff here are plenty retentive already.
How does this change anything? (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot biases (Score:3, Insightful)
I have not actually seen any posts accepting it unquestioningly. At least none getting significantly modded up.
So, you know. Calm down. Talk about the actual article, don't just complain about Slashdot.
(Yes, I know this post is hypocritcal)
It's funny... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Nice Result, But... (Score:5, Insightful)
This study will be very useful as a counterbalance to the MS-funded studies, andgiven that it's backed by IBM, it can't be as easily ignored by management as some of the other, recent refutations of MS's results.
News, no. Good PR, most definately.
Parent
Re:Bias in Reports? (Score:3)
Maybe because IBM sells and supports both Windows and Linux systems(and Solaris, too, BTW - or at least they did a few years ago) and therefore might be less biased than a company that manufactures and sells only Windows?