[TriLUG] OT: figuring out financial info for switching to Linux

[Thunder Bear]

On Wed, 2002-09-04 at 12:20, Lisa C. Boyd wrote:
> This may be somewhat off topic - but I couldn't think of a better place
> to ask :)
> 
> Have any of you (either for your own client or the company you work for)
> had to figure out financial information such as ROI, etc for using
> Microsoft vs. Linux? 

Yes but it has been a couple of years.

The differences were pretty amazing (in favor of Linux or OpenBSD).

> I'm not really good with numbers although I could
> follow formulas for stuff if I had good directions. Where do you learn
> to do this? Is this the kind of thing an accountant would do?

I'm not a math whiz either.  I got most of my numbers from having a
problem in front of me, and calling sales reps for both Windows and
Linux (or OpenBSD) implementations.  Even when you figure in the cost of
buying a box set of Linux or OpenBSD, it is much much cheaper.

Also Microsoft has long pushed the mindset of one box per role.  So your
PDC is only a PDC, your file server is only a file server, etc.  Linux &
OpenBSD can both readily handle many tasks per box, so the hardware
costs savings can be pretty large.  Where the numbers really rack up
fast is client access licenses.  With Microsoft, you don't just license
the desktop operating system, but you have to buy a client access
license for every client and for every server.  So if you have 25 users
and 5 servers, you actually need to buy 125 client access licenses in
most cases.

The OS is not the only licensing hassle.  Wanna run an RDBMS?  For most
NT shops you're talking either Oracle or MS SQL.  Start racking up the
CAL's again (and possibly per-processor fees for your server... you are
penalized for having a fast server!).  On the open source side, one is
likely to choose PostgreSQL or maybe for less critical apps MySQL. 
There are no licensing fees associated with either one.

All of the hardware/software/licensing costs really rack up with the
Microsoft solutions.  The open source solutions are generally very
straightforward to price out, and don't hit you with a lot of hidden
costs.  And we're only talking about the initial investment here.

A UNIX sysadmin will generally cost you more than an NT sysadmin. 
Someone who is competent in both platforms will be worth a small
fortune.  For the corporation, this might on the surface make Windows
look more attractive.  However, that would be a very shallow place to
stop looking at TCO.

Microsoft servers need more care and feeding.  You will need more MCSE's
per server cluster than you would for a similarly sized UNIX cluster. 
So while the MCSE's are a little cheaper than the UNIX geeks, you will
need more of the MCSE's.

I'm only scratching the surface here of course.

While the numbers might be a little closer to one another for a small
implementation, for a large shop with say 10,000 seats or so the cost
differences become so great that I really don't understand why a
competent manager would go with the Microsoft solution, unless they were
getting some sort of kickback (I speak from first hand experience, M$
loyalists do have their perks).

And of course for very large shops, you can run Linux on big iron.  You
can't do that with the M$ solution.  If you have a huge financial
application you will need to run it on a large array of PeeCee hardware
for the M$ solution.  For the Linux solution, IBM would be happy to sell
you a single z390 that will run the huge financial app in a small
logical partition of the overall system, leaving plenty of capacity for
running other systems as well.  Small companies often want to grow into
big companies.  Microsoft just doesn't scale.  Take a look at the most
stable LARGE SCALE networks.  They are almost without fail UNIX based. 
Migrating from NT to UNIX is an expensive proposition.  The bigger you
become, the more difficult it is to migrate.  Why not start off on the
right foot in the first place, and avoid hassles in the future?  It's
hard to put a price on that.

-- 
-=[*Thunder Bear*]=-

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