By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
Feb. 13, 2006
SourcePut it in their copy of the Wall Street Journal. Place it between their doughnuts and coffee. Stick a copy in their organizer. Do whatever it takes to get your senior executives to read the new research report, "Get the Truth on Linux Management," cosponsored by the OSDL (Open Source Development Labs) and Linux management company Levanta.
After years of putting up with Microsoft's anti-Linux half-truths in its Get-the-FUD campaign, Linux supporters are finally striking back.
But if that's all this report was, I'd barely bother with it.
Operating system flame wars may be exciting, but no one ever changes their positions because of them. People just harden into the positions they were already occupying.
What's different about this report from Microsoft's endless series of anti-Linux reports is that it focuses on the hard evidence of uptime, management and software costs, and system administrator costs per server and user. By those basic metrics, they (Microsoft) prove that Linux is simply easier and cheaper to manage on servers than Windows.
Actually, OSDL and Levanta don't need to prove anything. The numbers speak for themselves.
Microsoft has been willing to concede that the upfront costs for Linux can be cheaper. The boys from Redmond, though, have always argued that Linux was far more expensive to provision and maintain than Windows.
Poppycock!
The survey of over 200 responses, from mostly SMBs (small-to-medium businesses) with from less than 20 servers to over a 1000 servers, found that "Over half of the respondents can provision a new Linux server in less than 1 hour, and 20% can do so in less than 20 minutes. For sites with sophisticated tools, over 75% spent less than 1 hour to provision a new Linux system and one third could provision the OS in less then 20 minutes. None took longer than 5 hours."
Patching? "Half of all respondents spend less than 5 minutes per server per week on Linux patch management; 85% spend less than 30 minutes."
Security? "Half of all respondents spend less then 5 minutes per server per week, and 75% spend less than 10 minutes." That's without management tools. With management tools "the effort goes down even further -- 52% spend less than 5 minutes per server per week, and 85% spend less than 10 minutes."
What will your Windows administrators be doing tomorrow, Valentine's Day? I suspect they'll be spending a wee bit more than ten minutes on security patching, since Microsoft will be releasing seven security patches for multiple software vulnerabilities. Two of those are rated critical. And, of course, that doesn't count the four unpatched security problems that, according to eEye Digital Security, are more than fifty days overdue.
Oh, and that little problem of anti-viral and spyware that Microsoft somehow overlooks in its Linux vs. Microsoft studies? "88% of Linux administrators spend less than 10 minutes per server each week managing viruses and spyware. When sophisticated tools are in use, 95% of administrators spend less than 10 minutes per server per week, and no administrator with sophisticated tools spends more than 30 minutes per server per week."
I could go on, but you can read the report yourself (PDF download). The bottom line is that Linux takes up less time to run and provision than Windows.
But what about the costs? Microsoft has always claimed that Linux management tools and administrators are more expensive than their Windows counterparts.
While this study found that "Linux administrator salaries are very close to Windows administrator salaries," but marginally higher, it also found that in SMBs, "Linux administrators managed on average 15 servers, and each Windows administrator only 12." In addition, Linux administrators tended to run more users per system than their Windows brethren. In short, Linux system managers gave better value per dollar of compensation.
Last, but never least, the study includes a breakdown of the upfront costs of a Windows 2003 server with business-class Web services, DBMS, development tools, and 45 client access licenses vs. the Red Hat Enterprise Linux equivalent. The results? $60,185 for the Microsoft setup, $6,494 for the Red Hat rig.
Now, of course, this study was done by Linux supporters, so it's pro-Linux. Unlike Microsoft's campaign, however, OSDL and Levanta make no bones about where they're coming from.
Another major difference in the "Get the Truth on Linux Management" report is that the people behind it do a good job of explaining their methodology. Again, unlike Microsoft, they don't hide the studies' weak points.
For example, while they looked at large companies with over a thousand Linux servers, they didn't look at enough companies with large numbers of Windows servers to really compare them. Unlike a certain company in Redmond, Wash., rather than just give bogus results, OSDL and Levanta said they couldn't make a valid comparison and moved on.
And maybe with this report in hand, you can get your CFO and CIO to start moving on from Windows 2000 and Server 2003 to Linux on their servers. Even after you consider the report's authors' natural bias, the numbers really do make it perfectly clear that, especially for SMBs, Linux is the better business choice.
Download the report here:
Get the Truth on Linux Management