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The Almighty Buck Operating Systems Software Unix Windows Linux

IBM Reports Indicate Linux TCO Is Lower 334

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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IBM Reports Indicate Linux TCO Is Lower

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  • but but (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    But I just read a report sponsored by Microsoft saying that Windows had a lower TCO. Who should I believe? Oh, and FP!
    • Now you got several different reports, you can now calculate the median. Thus we know know that the TOC of Linux equals that of MS Windows, with Solaris being some 50% more expensive.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Funny, but... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      in the real world, people need to make decisions that will make or break their businesses/bank accounts.
      People should use whatever will work best for their particular situation.
      Having said this, I firmly believe that you (as a business owner/leader) should decide what OS, etc. should be used with your geek staff, not based on what some overpriced consultant with a sales agenda says you should use.
    • by jim_v2000 ( 818799 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @11:36AM (#13455414)
      And use whichever one you feel most comfortable with, because in the long run, the cost of having the box sitting there is going to be about the same. I'd bet that most of the cost difference just depends on the IT staff. I'm sure that there are experienced Windows and Linux IT guys that can keep their respective boxes running well for little cost. It's when you get bumbletards running around trying to be IT that causes the TCO to rise.
      • There is an ideological difference too, shops that do better with windows, value broad external support more than self-sufficiency, shops that do better with Linux seems to value self-sufficiency more and enjoy roll-your-own projects and do a lot of sand-box what-if with different sofware to see what works what doesn't and what is needed to make that perfect fit.

        Personnaly, I find haveing software dictate business methods oppressive so I rolled-my-own.
    • Re:but but (Score:5, Funny)

      by MightyMartian ( 840721 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @11:40AM (#13455461) Journal
      Torvald's Heroes

      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!

  • TCO vs. HMO (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 01, 2005 @09:59AM (#13454361)
    IBM cited one reason behind Windows higher TCO: medical bills incurred from employees banging their head on their desk.
    • IBM cited one reason behind Windows higher TCO: medical bills incurred from employees banging their head on their desk.

      Except that it seems report doesn't cover this topic in its full extension. They forgot to calculate desk damage
  • by yagu ( 721525 ) * <yayagu.gmail@com> on Thursday September 01, 2005 @10:00AM (#13454368) Journal

    From the article:

    it found that 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.

    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:

    "second-stage" benefits that some companies are experiencing by implementing Linux. Second-stage benefits expand upon initial benefits such as lower hardware and licensing costs to include the ability to consolidate server workloads, reduce IT hardware upgrade costs, and attract new IT workers interested in open source. The 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."

    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)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 01, 2005 @10:05AM (#13454440)
      Other than Sun's high licensing costs I'm at a loss on why Solaris would be so much higher.

      My guess would be:
      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.
      • Re:My guess is (Score:3, Insightful)

        by strider44 ( 650833 )
        Isn't that the same argument Microsoft has against Linux?
        • Re:My guess is (Score:3, Insightful)

          by j-cloth ( 862412 )
          Perhaps, but the argument is now opposed by the second study that says how many eager new IT people have Linux skills. Young = cheap.
          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)

        by dajak ( 662256 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @11:07AM (#13455120)
        My guess would be:

              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.

        • Re:My guess is (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Master of Transhuman ( 597628 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @11:14AM (#13455203) Homepage
          Or one could look at this as a problem:

          "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.
          • Re:My guess is (Score:5, Insightful)

            by 51mon ( 566265 ) <Simon@technocool.net> on Thursday September 01, 2005 @12:13PM (#13455756) Homepage
            "I don't care what it's doing, a fifteen-year-old machine is obsolete NOW."

            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?
          • Re:My guess is (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Marillion ( 33728 )

            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.

            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)

          by MrSenile ( 759314 )
          Working with Sun equipment from the standard Blade 150's up to the Sunfire 25K's, I can say the following with ease:

          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
    • Not to be too cynical but...
      1. IBM has a vested interest in making other UNIX products look more expensive. Linux (which IBM touts) is more likely to replace a UNIX machine than a Windows box.
      2. IBM is not Microsoft's buddy in this arena.
    • by PIPBoy3000 ( 619296 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @10:10AM (#13454476)
      I'm admittedly a Windows person for the most part, as that's the environment I live in at work. The good news about the GUI-based environment is that it's typically fairly easy to pick up a new Windows tool and figure it out. For the semi-casual administrator/developer, that can be immensely useful.

      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.
      • I understand your complaint about the burden of UIs, but I think that if you're working in ASP.NET, it's foolish not to use Visual Studio. While it's true that there are a lot of GUI helpers and wizards and what-not that start to get in the way once you reach a certain level of expertise, at the end of the day you can still work directly with the code in VS. The advantages of having inline help, syntax coloring, auto-completion, project organization, etc. in the native home of ASP.NET editing are just too m
        • by Master of Transhuman ( 597628 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @11:26AM (#13455313) Homepage
          "The advantages of having inline help, syntax coloring, auto-completion, project organization, etc. in the native home of ASP.NET editing are just too many to think that another environment like a pure text editor would be a good idea."

          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.
          • by mchawi ( 468120 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @11:37AM (#13455437)
            On Linux you can look at a config file that *gasp* gives you the same information that those checkboxes are - the settings that the system is running under.

            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.
      • by Lonewolf666 ( 259450 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @10:41AM (#13454844)
        The good news about the GUI-based environment is that it's typically fairly easy to pick up a new Windows tool and figure it out. For the semi-casual administrator/developer, that can be immensely useful.

        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.
      • by ArsonSmith ( 13997 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @11:56AM (#13455617) Journal
        That makes the best description of windows vs unix usiability I think I've ever heard.

        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.
      • The problem is that after a certain point, it becomes difficult to figure out complex issues.

        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:)

    • Salary (Score:3, Insightful)

      by knarfling ( 735361 )
      My first thought at why it would be more expensive for Solaris would be that an experienced Solaris Admin can command a much higher salary. Although we would like to believe that a good Linux Admin can work with all kinds of Unix/Linux varients, there are enough differences between them that an admin with home or small business Linux experience might have a little difficulty on a larger Unix system.

      It could also be that because Unix is perceived to be a "big busness" operating system, companies are wil
    • I agree that Windows' scriptability is nowhere near Linux's, but I've found that if you combine Python, a few ported Linux command line tools and the windows task scheduler, you can do quite a few things. For example, I've written a script to check my DSL connection and reconnect if it's unresponsive. Now if only I could find a way to close that "server did not respond" window :(
      • Now if only I could find a way to close that "server did not respond" window :(

        That should be possible - just use the Windows API to locate the message window by titlebar, and send the appropriate message to the window (WM_CLOSE) or OK button (WM_CLICK, IIRC). Please double-check these with the documentation - it's been a while since I did any Windows programming.
      • Now if only I could find a way to close that "server did not respond" window

        Haven't done it on Windows, but I think I'd use urllib to grab google.com page and if it threw up an exception that indicates failed connection then i'd do whatever you do to reconnect DSL.

        To stay on topic, I'd say that you're correct that scripted management can be done on Windows too, it's just that it's so damn hard. Endless installing and associated rebooting, while on most unix' reasonable tools are installed by default.

        The

      • yes but that has got nothing to do with scalability.

        You are merely pointing out that windows is scriptable too, which I don't dispute but sooner or later you will need to interact with a GUI , which frankly as a sys admin I would much hope to avoid.

    • by StandardDeviant ( 122674 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @10:20AM (#13454611) Homepage Journal
      And it's not even the up-front hardware costs that can kill you (Solaris 10 on an opteron is actually pretty damned price-competitive), it is the relative rarity of the applicable skillsets (and there can be a world of difference between a high-end Solaris, AIX, etc. machine and your common linux server on Dell hardware or whatever) which leads to increased salaries for the in-house administrative staff and the cost of vendor maintenance contracts which tend to be much higher than you might expect coming from the windows/x86/etc. world. (On the other hand, with proprietary Unix you do sometimes get what you pay for. High-end support from a single vendor who provided both the hardware and software in a system can be pretty reassuring if you have a business-critical system, and proprietary Unix runs on hardware that in some cases can do things that your common x86 stuff just does not scale to, both in terms of reliability and in terms of capability. As with all things, tools have jobs they are better suited to than others.)
    • It's encouraging to note linux is enormously popular among IT staff.

      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
    • 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.

      The article says a "comperable Sparc-based Solaris server". Sparc servers are significantly more expensive than a comperable AMD or Intel processor. My guess that would account for much of the cost difference.

  • by Metzli ( 184903 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @10:01AM (#13454382)
    The article says that the study shows Linux to be cheaper than either Microsoft or Sun. Gee, I wonder why AIX wasn't included as a Unix variant?
    • Solaris and Windows run on x86.

      AIX doesn't.
    • " The article says that the study shows Linux to be cheaper than either Microsoft or Sun. Gee, I wonder why AIX wasn't included as a Unix variant?"

      I am a big Linux advocate, but I feel about this study the same as I do about the Microsoft studies saying Windose TCO is lower than Linux. IBM has a vested interest in Linux adoption so of course any study they publish is going to be pro-Linux.

    • Maybe they didn't think it appropriate for an IBM funded study to consider an IBM operating system?

      Leaving it out isn't exactly a positive for AIX since it then has no chance of competing with the others. If they were interested in using this to push AIX they wouldn't have allowed Solaris to be the only proprietary Unix OS in the story. If Solaris comes out ahead it would be a plus for Sun that's not easily translatable to AIX. If Solaris loses, all the proprietary Unixes can be given a bad rap since all
  • see .pdf (Score:5, Informative)

    by Janek Kozicki ( 722688 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @10:01AM (#13454383) Journal
    Actual .pdf of the study here [ibm.com].
  • Imagine that... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by It doesn't come easy ( 695416 ) * on Thursday September 01, 2005 @10:02AM (#13454384) Journal
    But Linux's licensing-cost edge is likely to wane as Microsoft and some Unix vendors, notably Sun Microsystems, lower their prices.

    Competition drives prices down...who'd of thought...
  • by rob_squared ( 821479 ) <<rob> <at> <rob-squared.com>> on Thursday September 01, 2005 @10:03AM (#13454411)
    Reviews having actual dollar amounts I tend to trust more. Yes, IBM can be considered biased because, well, they use Linux, and also deal with Microsoft.

    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)

    by notdanielp ( 244035 ) <dpritchett&gmail,com> on Thursday September 01, 2005 @10:04AM (#13454418)
    Per-OS TCO does not exist in a vacuum. Organizational direction, sunk costs from previous IT investments, interoperability with business partners / clients / vendors... each of these is a factor that will be different for EVERY business making the Linux/Windows/etc. choice.

    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.
    • by mollymoo ( 202721 )
      Per-OS TCO does not exist in a vacuum. Organizational direction, sunk costs from previous IT investments, interoperability with business partners / clients / vendors... each of these is a factor that will be different for EVERY business making the Linux/Windows/etc. choice.

      IMO a well-run organization will have a hybrid environment.

      If every business has different needs why do you think they should all go with a hybrid environment?

  • by karvind ( 833059 ) <karvind@NoSPAM.gmail.com> on Thursday September 01, 2005 @10:04AM (#13454420) Journal
    How are these cost calculations done ?

    (a) Maintenance costs

    (b) Support and systems administration costs

    (c) Application-server support and system administration costs.

    Are these really fixed costs ?

    • yes the can be considered fixed. Maintenance is generally 20-22% of the license fee per year for a product. Support & Sys Admin - X number of admins per Y boxes times thier salary. Unless you are shrinking or growing the environment drastically these costs can be considered fixed. App Server Support - is that software or admin support? Software support can be budgeted at X heads per year and all the fixes have to fit in that budget. So it can be considered a fixed cost as it isn't going to go up or
  • by m50d ( 797211 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @10:04AM (#13454421) Homepage Journal
    remember that IBM has a substantial interest in Linux. If it was the other way around we'd be crying foul about how studies will always find in favour of whoever's funding them. Anyone know if there's ever been a truly independent comparison
    • IBM also has a substantial interest in selling its own Unix variant AIX. A study that's going to be used as evidence of Linux having lower TCO than MS or Unix is not exactly good for that part of their business.
  • What about (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Tmack ( 593755 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @10:04AM (#13454426) Homepage Journal
    X-86 based solaris and Sparc based Linux? While I dont work with any of ther former, I work with many of the latter. While the hardware for sparc costs more than similar X86 hardware, does the TCO for running Linux as opposed to Solaris make up for that extra hardware expense? Does running Solaris on X86 increase the TCO?

    Tm

  • The article should put more emphasis on it being a server replacement; not a desktop replacement.

    And the article misses that Linux only does 80% of what real Unix (like Solaris) implementations do (posix compliance for one, especially about shared memory and timing.)

    It would be interesting one day to see a feature [complete] chart comparing "free" Unix implementations like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, OpenSolaris, and Linux. I have a suspicion that OpenSolaris would win a feature race.

    • That's a silly assumption to make.

      As a whole, linux development proceeds at a breakneck pace and adds as many features as it possibly can.

      By comparison, all of the other environments are far more rigorous and controlled. Linux has more developers, too.

      Because of these things, it would make sense that linux has more available for it. What makes you think otherwise?
    • You're making the wholly incorrect assumption that it's all about features. There are much more important questions like:

      1) will it run your apps (ISV base)
      2) will it fall over in a jibbering heap
      3) does it run on commodity hardware.
      4) how much TLC does it need on an ongoing basis.

      POSIX compliance is not necessarily a good thing. I'd rather it did something sensible that worked.
  • In other news, Microsoft reports indicate that Windows TCO is lower. Sun reports that Solaris TCO is lower.

    Hmmm... I wonder who Novell would side with?

    • Novell Netware is pretty much dead in marketing terms (I guess some big installations are still around), but Novell has bought SuSE and is promoting that Linux version now. So they have an interest in making Linux look good.
  • Bullshit research (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mwvdlee ( 775178 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @10:07AM (#13454460) Homepage
    I don't need to RTFA to know that IBM is making pretty good money of Linux. No wonder the "research" says Linux is cheaper.
    It's the same as Microsoft "research"; 100% pure marketing drivel.
    • The point of the article (not the studies) is that IBM sponsored some research that found the opposite of MS's studies.

      The article is insinuating what you have stated, which is why the last paragraph of the article is so important:

      "The lesson to be learned from these Linux and Windows TCO comparisons is that companies need to conduct a little research of their own before making any IT platform decisions. Actual costs are bound to be very specific to each company's needs."

      Please read the entire articl
    • by Shotgun ( 30919 )
      You might want to actually know what IBM does before spouting such drivel. IBM makes no more money selling Linux than Windows. IBM doesn't even have their own distribution.

      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
  • by gowen ( 141411 ) <gwowen@gmail.com> on Thursday September 01, 2005 @10:08AM (#13454464) Homepage Journal
    that an IBM-funded report favoring Linux won't get treated with the same healthy scepticism that a Microsoft-funded report favoring Window.

    Folks : if you treat any of these studies as anything other than another form of advertising, you're a fool.
    • I'm the other way. I think 43k/yr is just some random figure pulled out of their ass.

      Gentoo Linux is free. So above the energy, space, staffer requirements the GNU/Linux costs are ZERO.

      You'd need an "IT guy" even if you ran friggin MS-DOS with Netware extensions...

      Why people think it's ANY different with different OSes is beyond me.

      Tom
    • IBM-funded report favoring Linux won't get treated with the same healthy scepticism that a Microsoft-funded report

      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.

  • An important point to bring up: How can we, with a straight face, toot our horns about the IBM funded report, while discounting Microsoft funded reports as biased because they are not funded by an independant group?
    • ...while discounting Microsoft funded reports as biased because they are not funded by an independant group?

      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?

  • Another study done by every Mac user ever has proven definitively that nobody who actually purchases computers cares about TCO and never will.
  • WTF? (Score:5, Informative)

    by tomstdenis ( 446163 ) <tomstdenis.gmail@com> on Thursday September 01, 2005 @10:11AM (#13454498) Homepage
    We built 8 gentoo linux boxes in the span of two weeks here at my office.

    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:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      In corporate America, we don't "build" servers, we buy them, from HP, IBM, Sun, etc.

      We also buy support plans for them, so when parts fail, we can call the vendor and have them delivered to us anytime, day or night. Not having to wait to run to the CompUSA first thing in the morning to buy a replacement for that failed hard disk.

      These annual support fees are figured into these TCO studies, as they should be.

      • Then you get what you deserve.

        It's much cheaper [and free-marketish] to pick out your own components and build it. And really, it doesn't take that long provided you have the staff to build it.

        Though I guess if you want the fast-food of computing you deserve either shite service or expensive networks [or both].

        Tom

    • I haven't RTFA, so this might have been addressed and I'm not aware. Seems to me that the reason staff costs are included in TCO studies is that different systems require different amounts of manpower to maintain. So while your guy might be able to handle 32 Gentoo boxes, you'll need more or less staff than that to handle the same number of Windows, Solaris, or other platforms. You can't just throw out the costs of staff unless it requires an equal amount of manpower to manage each of the platforms in th
      • Well I know for one we won't be wasting time with updating anti-virus and firewall and the sort.

        Generally in the field you don't update all the working tools that often anyways. So once you get a Linux box going and working proper it'll keep going until the hardware dies.

        It's when you start upgrading software that the hairy bits come out. For the most part an update in Gentoo goes off without a hitch so it ammounts to either rolling out updates or just clone a master and spend the 7 minutes per box to unp
    • Re:WTF? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Builder ( 103701 )
      The other 43k a year is ost likely for lots of things.

      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
  • They need to hire an IT consultancy, call them The Dixie Group, to issue the report on their behalf.

    1/2:)
  • Finally we have an objective TCO study from an impartial... err, yeah... IBM.
  • Actually, I know that's an exaggeration; however (in my experience), I see more CEO's screaming ROI, than I do TCO.

    To them, I suppose they see everything as similar, and "What's going to make my company stand out?".
  • None of these TCO studies seem to make any reference to the capabilities of your people.

    It is well known amongst software engineering disciplines that 2 programmers of equal education and experience can vary in performance by as much as a factor of 10, and I'm sure a similar differential applies amongst sysadmin staff.

    Therefore, I'd argue that people are perhaps the most significant contributing factor towards the TCO of any chosen vendor's platform. A Linux server farm managed by idiots is going to have a
  • So True (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Comatose51 ( 687974 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @10:19AM (#13454598) Homepage
    .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.

    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.

  • by gardyloo ( 512791 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @10:19AM (#13454600)
    This has resulted in Linux playing a significant role in the recruitment and retention of IT staff and managers."

          I don't know about elsewhere, but the IT staff here are plenty retentive already.
  • "Robert Frances Group interviewed IT executives involved with operating-system selection and purchase decisions at more than 20 midsize to large companies that have 250 or more employees." (emphasis mine)

    "Pund-IT's conclusions are based on lengthy research with three companies: Alliance UniChem, Boscov's Department Stores, and Zahid Tractor & Heavy Machinery." (emphasis also mine)

    This is great news and will hopefully spur further research.

    However, the methodology of the first study bothers me. In
  • So what... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by fitten ( 521191 )
    every week we see a report claiming one or the other is "Lower TCO!!11one"... I'm pretty much numb to it now and don't pay attention to them anymore. I/we use what we need to get our job done efficiently and move on. Besides, I haven't seen a "study" yet that comes close to what we need to do here so they are largely irrelevant to us anyway.

    All these "studies" are just hot air now.
  • ... I mean you can only fight PR with PR. It was abotu time that after the some dozen MS-sponsored "objetive" tco campaigns a big player stands up and makes a campaign in favour of Linux.

    Don't get me wrong, I would never blindly trust any campaign's result which is payed by the winner. Still, for the masses it is important that a big player says Linux tco is lower. It really matters.

    IBM, thumbsup.

  • by TheCabal ( 215908 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @10:28AM (#13454691) Journal
    Every time MS puts out a report that Windows TCO is lower, everyone here dismisses it as propaganda. What about this time? IBM has a substantial investment in Linux and I noticed that their own AIX wasn't used as an example. It's just another case of manipulating the facts to fit one particular view. To call it anything else is intellectually dishonest.
  • ..Microsoft releasing a report that Linux has lower TCO or IBM saying Linux is more expensive to run. I mean, just because it's a "research report" makes it no less an advertisment by the company that sponsered it. All this shows is these reports are kinda pointless because you can "prove" whatever you want to believe.
  • Read the fine print. (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
  • How is a study done by IBM that touts the virtues of Linux any more credible than a study done by MS showing MS products are better?

    IBM is basing it's future (in large part) on Linux. I wouldn't be surprised if they said Linux can resurrect the dead, just to improve marketshare. And if you honestly believe they're above such things, well...

  • They compare x86 Linux and Windows to Solaris SPARC. To be fare they should have used Solaris x86.

    Secondly since they're comparing with Solaris SPARC, where is AIX solution? Come on IBM lets disclose the TCO of AIX in relation to Solaris.

  • How much would it cost if you'd use Macs?
  • DeskTop TCO (Score:2, Insightful)

    by MrCopilot ( 871878 )
    Hardware Equal.

    Windows Software +299 for Windows OS
    Plus Several Thousand for Apps.

    Games are equal cost on both systems. More Games on Linux for same price.

    Linux Software = $5 month Cedega + $50 UT2K4
    Most Everything else is apt-got.

    My Admin time is the same on both, I just enjoy the linux stuff alot more.

    This study was funded by me. I am biased because it was my money, I'm biased toward the cheaper solution. Solution is the Key, Has to work.

    I choose Linux cause it works first and is cheaper se

  • dumb (Score:2, Insightful)

    by danielk1982 ( 868580 )
    TCO studies are frequently misleading.

    They can also be molded to fit *any* conclusion since the creator of the study controls and defines the conditions from which he basis his conclusions. These initial conditions are very subjective.

    TCO studies looking at Windows vs. Linux vs. Mac vs. Unix are especially bad because of the zealotry involved. Besides this, their results only apply to scenarios (like every TCO study), "If I have setup A, these people working for me, and I want to accomplish B, C and D then
  • Slashdot biases (Score:3, Insightful)

    by allanc ( 25681 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @11:05AM (#13455096) Homepage
    You know, I'm seeing a lot of posts saying things along the lines of "If this were a Microsoft study, everyone would be calling foul, but since it's IBM and it's pro-Linux, everyone's going to accept it unquestioningly!"

    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)
  • Total Cost for Me (Score:2, Insightful)

    by darkbit ( 873716 )
    These TCO stories are baffling to me. With the cost of hardware remaining the same, Linux is the clear winner:

    Linux: $0
    Windows: $129

  • It's funny... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by .com b4 .storm ( 581701 ) on Thursday September 01, 2005 @12:08PM (#13455717)
    It's funny how Microsoft funds a TCO study that shows Windows to be lower in cost, and the Slashbots rise up and flood the comments with "well of COURSE that's what a MICROSOFT funded study will show." Yet when IBM does the same thing, there is a distinct lack of comments of the same sort. Newsflash: corporation funds a study and the results miraculously serve its interests!

The 11 is for people with the pride of a 10 and the pocketbook of an 8. -- R.B. Greenberg [referring to PDPs?]

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