[Am-info] Linux TCO Less Than Half The Cost of Windows

[Gene Gaines]

,

I hope this has not been reported here before, I
have been so busy that have not read everything
on the list in the past two weeks.

Gene Gaines
gene.gaines@gainesgroup.com
Sterling, Virginia  USA

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>From internet.com.

http://cin.earthweb.com/public/article/0,,10493_1477911,00.html


Linux TCO: Less Than Half The Cost of Windows

by Dan Orzech

October 7, 2002: Sure Linux is cheaper - but by how much? A new
study looks at real-life deployments and comes up with some hard
numbers.

The cost of running Linux is roughly 40% that of Microsoft
Windows, and only 14% that of Sun Microsystem's Solaris, according
to a new study which examined the actual costs of running various
operating systems over three years.

The study, by the Robert Frances Group, in Westport, Conn., looked
at production deployments of Web servers running on the three
operating systems at 14 Global 2000 enterprises.

Linux cost $74,475 over three years, while a Windows deployment
cost $190,662 and one on Solaris $561,520.

Most of the savings with Linux come from software licensing fees.
Companies will typically purchase commercial versions of Linux for
pilot projects, says Robert Frances Group senior research analyst
Chad Robinson, and download free versions off the Web for
production deployments.

Only 27% of the Linux servers in the study were provisioned with
purchased copies of their respective distributions.

That allows organizations to "significantly lower their software
costs, and take advantage of the economies of scale that make
Linux a more compelling option," Robinson says. The larger the
deployment, the greater the savings: One of the companies in the
study had deployed more than 10,000 Linux nodes.

Linux, along with Solaris, also came out ahead of Windows in terms
of administration costs, despite the fact that it's less expensive
to hire Windows system administrators. The average Windows
administrator in the study earned $68,500 a year, while Linux sys
admins took home $71,400, and those with Solaris skills were paid
$85,844. The Windows technicians, however, only managed an average
of 10 machines each, while Linux or Solaris admins can generally
handle several times that.

There were other costs the study was not able to quantify,
according to Robinson, such as security. While study participants
were reluctant to provide hard figures on the costs of security
breaches, it appears that the "cost for handling security issues
on Windows systems was very high," says Robinson. The study
revealed that Windows administrators spent twice as much time
patching systems and dealing with other security-related issues
than did Solaris or Linux admins.

Of the companies in the study, almost half were in the financial
or insurance industries, along with several retailers and
educational institutions, and one manufacturing firm. All of the
organizations running Linux been running it in production for at
least two years; most of them had been using it for three years or
longer.