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.'"

Headline

Mindbridge Switches to Linux Saves Bunches of Money is it me or is this headline a wet dream for most slashdot posters ?

Not news

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.

windows fanbois

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

Re:

Seriously. This article is basically "Guy with 15 servers converts 13 of them to Linux." 13 whole servers. Damn, Microsoft must be quaking in their boots over this one.

This story is utterly pointless.

Eh, no. It's "Guy with 60 Windows servers"

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.

Re:Not too bad for little guys

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.

Re:Not too bad for little guys

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)

Re:

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

Re:

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

Linux...

Fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more on your operational cost.

Re:

So easy, even a caveman (read: RMS) can do it!

Re:Linux...

There's no way RMS could convert to Linux in 15 minutes or less. Hell, he'd spend at least 15 days trying to convince people to call it GNU/Linux before he would even begin the install.

Re:

Yep, definitely not using Gentoo...

Scale

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 [cnn.com], 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.

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Like a good server... Linux is there.

Re:

which operating system runs your virtual server room?

Would have saved more

If they threatened to swich to Linux, then they'll get to use the same MS products at Linux price.

Would have spent more at any price.

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%.

what the....

Was this thing written by a 4 year old? I was expecting to see OMG PONIEZZZ!! at the end.

In other news

Software costs nothing.... Compared to the cost of supporting it.

Re:

Software costs nothing.... Compared to the cost of supporting it.

Yep, and the ratio of software cost to support cost for both Windows and Linux is roughly the same...

Re:In other news

Software costs nothing.... Compared to the cost of supporting it.

Don't forget the hardware cost involved. If you pick an OS that requires twice the amount of servers, then your hardware costs - and other related maintenance costs, like technicians, electricity, etc. - go up very significantly.

In addition more hardware can mean more potential security breaches, and so forth.

Real company - just 15 servers?

two production Windows servers left, out of 15 or so

Is this "Mindbridge" a real company? I know geeks with 15 servers in their basement...

Re:

A company with 15 servers?!

15 servers where I work is barely a ROUNDING ERROR

Re:

FTFA

CEO Rick Puckette is enthusiastic about the change. "When we were using Microsoft, we had a lot more than 15 servers," he says. "We had upwards of 50 or 60 that were becoming difficult to manage. So as part of this open source initiative, we also chose

Re:Real company - just 15 servers?

two production Windows servers left, out of 15 or so

Is this "Mindbridge" a real company? I know geeks with 15 servers in their basement...

I don't know what business they are in (Safari crashes on TFA), but then: I have a very real company, two of them even, and I have only one server. It's doing what I need. But then I'm not in the business of selling web access, or server space, or so. Most companies have only one or two servers, because most companies are not in the business of selling server space. Besides, modern servers can handle a huge lot of work, one server now can easily handle what 10 servers did a decade or so ago.

Re:

Depends on what they do. In a windows environment that's nothing because each windows server application seems to demand it's own server - note that the article states the 15 or so mixed is down from 60 pure windows. Assuming no other software aside from

Technical question

Are those metric bunches?

Re:Technical question

No, if it were metric, it would have said so. It's clearly bunches, as in Libraries of Congress per fortnight. As a shortcut, this is roughly equal to one VW Beetle*.

*Old model, not new model. As everyone knows, substantially fewer circus clowns fit into the newer models, due to reduced trunk space and assorted government regulations regarding imports from Mexico.

This story has no credibility

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.

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They're a Linux company. They're telling us how great Linux is. They're not giving any details.

No, they aren't a Linux company. They don't sell Linux and their own products are not Linux-specific. The article says that they started out as a Microsoft sh

Re:This story has no credibility

It's a Linux.com article- a Linux company, telling you how great Linux is and not giving any details. It's what I'd be referring to if I was in his place.

Re:

*Absolutely* true. While that obviously justifies pointing out when Microsoft's case studies are erroneous, self-serving, or both, it doesn't justify other people using the same tactics.

Not that I'm saying this article is as bad as most of those articles.

The story is rather misleading...!

I will quote...

"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.

. . . Then later in the introductory piece...

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.'"

Emphasis mine by the way; the two words in bold appear to be contradictory...or are they?

Re:

Strictly speaking, yes, it's a contradiction. He should have said "almost completely". Big deal. It hardly invalidates the story.

Re:

Did the GP talk about `invalidation' at all? Or you did not fully understand what he meant....sheesh!

Re:

I am unable to make any sense of your comment. You asked whether the words are contradictory. I agreed that they are. I then went on to point out that it makes no real difference to the point of the article. No, you didn't use the word "invalidate", but y

Re:The story is rather misleading...!

Emphasis mine by the way; the two words in bold appear to be contradictory...or are they?

Not necessarily. The article said their infrastructure was revamped to run completely on open source software, and later that there are two production Windows servers in the shop. Considering part of their business is hosting, and (as they stated), some of their customers wish them to host Windows software, it's possible that these two Windows servers are part of the service they provide and not part of their infrastructure.

That being said, it's probably a domain controller and an Exchange server.

choice quotes from TFA

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.

.. had only ever administered Microsoft boxes in the past, and had to get used to the idea of command lines.

Can such a person exist? A system administrator who has to get used to the idea of command lines?!

...looked specifically for new hires who were eager to learn. "The people I like are pretty inquisitive type people. I tried to filter out the others in the interview process."

Sounds like the way we wish hiring decisions were made. Sounds too good to be true.

Re:choice quotes from TFA

"Can such a person exist? A system administrator who has to get used to the idea of command lines?!"

Only a very bad one. Knowing how to write a decent .bat script is required knowledge for a Windows sysadmin as far as I'm concerned.

Real Company?

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, for one

...have never heard of Mindbridge.

What really happened...

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.

It's not a hard choice, just perhaps costly.

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.)

Complex decission

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.

Other cost savings

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.

Three-card Monte with Win 2k Server

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.

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 [wikipedia.org]

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 /"c: ie6wzrd.exe - something like that).
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-Enhancement s/AutoPatcher.shtml [softpedia.com]

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 ... Web 2.0 goodness!!!!

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

Re:

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

Re:

'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 ubu

Re:Remember Folks

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 [samba.org] 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.