Australian TCO Study: Linux Wins Again 396
An anonymous reader writes "An updated Linux vs Windows TCO study has found that a 250-seat company can end up saving 36 percent if it were to equip its users with the open source operating system and applications that run on it."
Actual Study PDF (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Crap (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What about a larger company (Score:5, Informative)
If you get the CEO's backing it can be done as long as it is not rushed and your prepared to make it a long term goal. Middle management will always make things difficult, they have grown up on excel, vb etc. But as long as you have support from the top and dont stand on there toes to much it can be done.
* Start with web server, dns and dhcp migration to linux.
* Migrate the file servers to samba.
* Follow that by email.
* Replace browsers with firefox.
* Replace outlook with evolution or thunderbird.
* Start slow process of migrating desktop machines to linux. Start with upper management and people who only user email + open office. Single out a department for this if you can. X terminals can be a useful tool here.
* Look at replacing key database applications with open source alternatives. Most SQL database have unix and linux versions, expect for MS SQL.
Over a long time you can afford to look at replacing key infustructure.
* Replace ms office with open office.
* The small time custom apps that the organisation has collected over the last 20 years or any apps that are going to be too expensitve to port, place them on a w2k terminal server and access them from linux rdesktop. Over next 20 years they can be phased out.
* Complete migration to linux desktop.
* If there is an art department that use windows, use Mac OS X as your target platform.
* Leave the middle managers there windows laptops, just firewall them off. When they die or get to slow replace them with linux or powerbook laptops.
At the end try and aim for a couple dozen windows terminal servers to run whatever the organisation is still dependent on for windows, firewall these off to protect against virus and disable internet access on them. After 5 years these windows servers will slowly be decommissioned and the organisation would have made the complete switch.
Seriosuly. ... (Score:3, Informative)
There was a time when 0wn3rship by spam bots were not even considered a problem because everyone was on dialup anyway. More recently with the coming of broadband and lots of stupid users to the internet - that has become the major headache (ie spyware, malware and trojans are local issues, spam bots are bigger).
It's a real cost when the ISP cuts you off or sends you a fat bandwidth billRe:What about a larger company (Score:3, Informative)
The separate question which you seem to be asking is whether that's still true accounting for employee turnover. Well, I've not done any study on it myself, but if you're going to bring up retraining of new employees then you also have to consider the continued year-on-year savings of not having to provide each one with a Windows desktop equipped with Office, etc.
For the big businesses we're dicussing, Microsoft software is acquired through annual licencing, not one-off purchases, something that you might not have factored into your thinking. No Microsoft desktops means huge savings on the annual IT cost, more than enough to pay for a day's training in how to open Open Office et al.
Re:What about a larger company (Score:5, Informative)
Only if you haven't used Unix extensively. Compared to Windows managing multiple computers in Unix/Linux is trivial. You scripts don't care how many computers they connect to after all.
And managing things like AV/Firewall/WindowsUpdate is still not as streamlined as it can be on a Unix system.
Re:Biased in MS Favour (Score:2, Informative)
$9k of Symantec anti-virus.
In fact, they used the exact same figure for both
They used $45k for Windows and $135k for Linux.
About the only thing that struck me was comparing GIMP to Photoshop CS. I haven't used either (much) but I read everywhere that Photoshop is much better than the GIMP.
And another TCO I would like to see is a "hybrid" solution: ie Windows with OO or Windows desktop and Linux servers. Corporate networks are not homogenious, there is bound to be a mix of different hardware and software.
Re:Biased in MS Favour (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, I always make sure I schedule hard drive and power supply failures well in advance so that everyone can save their work beforehand.
TWW
Re:What about - so why not IBM still? (Score:1, Informative)
With this paradigm shift came two important changes: one was going from actually useful tools to pretty colorful tools (since the buyer didn't really understood what the tool served and how actually integrated into their environments you couldn't count on technical excelence to sell your product but you needed to make it candy-pretty).
Once management/bean counters went into this bussiness, savvy tech guys became quite disturbing since they could tell you how idiot you were thrasing big money on substandard tools, so the preferred choices shifted even more into the eye-candy even-a-monkey-can-use-it ones. This way you can hire people that is even more idiot than you so you are not confronted with your ill choices on a retro-feedbacked spiral (the clueless the managers/technicians, the easiest for a heavy-marketed company to sell their candy-like useless "tools", the clueless the managers/technicians become... up to date).
Re:Email migration? (Score:1, Informative)
Current easiest path is using postfix+ldap+IMAP and something like phpgroupware server-side and Xserver with KDE 3.3 desktop with Kontact for heavy client-side access (ligth/remote access you can cover with the HTML provided interfaces).
Re:What about a larger company (Score:3, Informative)
On one machine, using software like XGrid [apple.com], select all the machines you want to update, and issue the command. Sit back and watch as all machines you're updating complete their task.
Both Windows and Linux are now at the stage with automatic updates where large organisation can have one machine that downloads the updates, and acts as a server for the rest to get their updates from. This is as good as it gets, and both systems are there already. I'd be surprised if the same isn't true for updating of antivirus stuff.
The Gentoo Linux laptop I just put together has no open ports, so no need for a firewall. If only the same were true for Windows...
Here is how novell did it. (Score:3, Informative)
Get rid of ms office and install OO on windows desktops.
use NDS with windows client for your directory.
Install ifolder on windows desktops and instruct users to put all their documents in their ifolder.
Once the users are comfortable with groupwise, ifolder, and OO switch them over to linux running the same apps.
Smart and painless. The idea is to keep them on windows on the desktop until the end.
Note that products like NDS and groupwise are not open source, they are proprietary novell products.
Re:Identify functionality, not products. (Score:3, Informative)
Of course there are also tools like radmind too.
But the most significant thing is that you use linux differently then you use windows. For example you may use thin clients which eliminate the need to manage desktops at all. You may choose to mount a common
Unix was designed from day one to be mass managed. That makes a big difference. Studies show that a typical unix sysadmin administers way more machines then a typical windows sysadmin and there is a reason for that.
See "Look at the Numbers!" for more on OSS/FS TCO (Score:3, Informative)