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Apache Software Linux

Linux/Apache Wins TCO Survey 17

Posted by Hemos from the well-duh dept.
cant_get_a_good_nick writes "From this week's Apacheweek comes a link to a white paper discussing Total Cost of Ownership for Linux in the Enterprise. Some very good hard numbers here, although as always, YMMV. It shows that even with "expensive UNIX admins" having to switch over costs to a "new UNIX", admin costs are lower than for Windows or Solaris. Some great quotes too, I can see these plastered in posts for weeks to come. I wish they could have included FreeBSD in the survey, but all in all interesting."
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Linux/Apache Wins TCO Survey More

Linux/Apache Wins TCO Survey

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  • wondering...did anyone else not see this coming?

    *waits patiently for over zealous linux fans*
    • UNIX using folks can, most administrators if they're sued to UNIX can tell you how easy it is to keep stuff running, even if it isn't always easy to get them running in the first place. But folks used to Microsoft's "it's bundled and has defaults and a GUI so it MUST be easier" tend not to. If boss A hears some underling say "we should go Linux/FreeBSD/OpenBSD because it's cheaper" the boss is more likely to dismiss it than if someone gives him a detailed study with real numbers instead of seat of the pants guesses.

      I subminnted this a month ago, was hoping for front page so I could get some good flame wars^W^Wdiscussions going, sigh... ;)

  • Servers, yes, Desktop, no... (Score:3)

    by ceejayoz ( 567949 ) <cj@ceejayoz.com> on Saturday September 07, 2002 @09:33PM (#4214300) Homepage Journal
    This survey tells us what just about everyone knew - Linux/Apache web servers are by far the most cost effective way to go.

    This isn't, however, some wonderful thing for Linux on the desktop. So lets avoid the "see, now there's no reason not to switch to Linux on the desktop" posts, k?


    • Linux will never be on the desktop if it doesn't get easier to use. Most users don't know what a command prompt is, so how could they understand a linux console? There's not enough robust software to use and the choice between desktop environments (KDE and Gnome) would confuse people. Don't even get me started on the fact that there are multiple desktops...

  • Why not on the main page? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Perdo ( 151843 ) on Saturday September 07, 2002 @11:04PM (#4214539) Homepage Journal
    Sure this story confirms what we all knew. Microsoft even admitted it. But this is great ammo and could use better exposure. How many "ask slashdot" stories have we seen with some admin looking for just this sort of ammo to convince his bosses that Linux deployment was worthwile...

    On another note, wouldn't it have been nice to see more platforms included? X serve, FreeBSD, SGI, Alpha/Tru64 and Power 4 would have made good additions. Perhaps, if this is not just biased "Linux is the best because we didn't bother including good competitors", we could see some further research on this subject.
    • X server is too new to survey - no one has really deployed it yet, particularly in Fortune 500 companies. FreeBSD would be interesting. SGI, Alpha and Power 4 all have the same problem that Sun does (not forgetting HP/UX of course): Hardware cost. The cost per Processing Unit is WAY too high to take seriously unless you really really need it.

      The '''Good''' Competitor might be FreeBSD here, but compared to RedHat 7.3, it's not as available or as easy to deal with for the Marketroids that mostly make decisions.

      • Hmm, not as available, don't know if I quite agree with that. Yeah, Linux is sold in most comp shops and bookjstores, but they tend to be old. You'd have to update anyway. They're both sold online. The study is for web shops, so I'd hope a company on the web would have a fast link to download the ISO.

        The bigger problem I feel is the documentation. Linux is the OS that killed a million trees, there are books upon books for it, and they tend to go from very broad (Linux for Dummies) to the narrow based (the linux 2.2 kernel map, I do everything in user-land, don't need to know the intricacies of the kernel). There's a billion tuning guides. BSD has two or three of any depth, and the guides for tuning it are hard to find. Last time I built a kernel on FreeBSD (4.1, wow, that long ago) there still was a big chunk in the kernel config file that had zero documentation, and a bunch of those were tuning flags.

  • Linux wins big, but BSD loses yet again (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What We Can Learn From BSD
    By Chinese Karma Whore [slashdot.org], Version 1.0

    Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

    Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

    These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents [theos.com] on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

    As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT [mit.edu] found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study [rice.edu].

    Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar [tuxedo.org], rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

    The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

  • It's perfectly obvious. Windows based systems _still_ don't have the ability to be administered over a simple communications path such as an analogue phone line and a VT100 terminal. This means that if something goes wrong, the sysadmin concerned has to get up and go to the machine itself, which after hours could prove a costly exercise (in both overtime and downtime costs).

    There have been so many times I've managed to get a Un*x based system running again in minutes after a problem merely by using a mobile communicator with a VT100 emulator in it. I couldn't do that if it was running on Windows.
    • But of course the Windows sysadmin has to physically get up and go to the machine - everybody knows that the only proper, documented way to fix a problem with Windows is to
      1. hit the reset button.
      2. format and re-install

  • Solaris data in TCO. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by mason127 ( 547465 )
    Nothing, and I mean nothing warms the cockles of my heart more than seeing Redmond take it on the chin. RFG however does not seem to understand Solaris and it's operating costs. The $ 12,500.00 "licence" fee quoted in the report covers what? Normally when you purchase a Solaris Server the cost of the server licence is included. Since Solaris 8, Apache has been part of the Solaris OS distribution, there is no software cost associated with Apache. Support contracts under Sun Service while expensive by comparison to x86 software support, also include the costs of on site hardware replacement. As to scalability, attempting normalize capacities based on the per Processor Unit method in the study are misleading. Given the 9.1 GB/sec back plane of the 4800-6800 server line, the number of CPUs required in a horizontally scaled server farm would be many large multiples compared to the Solaris US III implementation. While Solaris admin's generally cost more than MS sys-admins, equating support and admin costs is some what misleading. Comparatively speaking, Soaris admin costs tend to be much lower on account of the stabilitym of the OS, and generally lower number of servers involved in a Sun Solaris installation. Also, as you must know, most of us rarely spend all of our time administering just one OS platform. This makes calculating costs difficult. All in all it is good to see that Open Source code is making it's way in to the enterprise, and is providing much needed copetition to Redmond.

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