tco
Golly, migrating from Solaris to SLES saves me money!
Many of us who pay attention to the Linux community recognize that moving from a proprietary hardware and OS (such as Solaris on SPARC hardware) to an open source OS (such as SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) and commodity hardware can save a lot of IT budget. But the question is… how much will it save and how long before I recoup my migration costs?
Novell recently posted a Solaris-to-Linux TCO Calculator which calculates the total cost of ownership over a 3 or 5 year period. It gives you nice charts like these and you can customize just about every parameter. Using mostly default selections, I threw in some basic figures (1000 users, 10 Sun servers, running a database), and the calculator showed a savings of well over $5M in direct costs over 5 years!
Event in Baltimore MD: Saving IT Budget with Linux (May 20)
Executive Breakfast with Novell & Mavenspire - Saving IT Budget with Linux
- May 20, 2008 @ Baltimore MD
- Part of the “Maximizing IT Value” Executive Breakfast Series
- Is your IT budget getting tighter? If so, come join us for breakfast and learn how you can leverage enterprise-grade Linux to save costs while maintaining high levels of service and availability. You’ll hear from industry professionals with decades of IT and data center experience—and squeeze in the most important meal of the day while you’re at it. Our experts will share their ideas about how Linux and its complementary solutions can help you stretch your IT budget. We’ll help you learn how to do more (with Linux) for less.
- Registration
- Space is extremely limited
Novell Reduces Cost of Ownership for Linux on IBM System z
From the press release:
WALTHAM, Mass.— 14 Apr 2008— To further help customers experience the benefits of Linux* on the mainframe, Novell today announced simplified pricing and discounts throughout 2008 for SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server for IBM’s System z mainframes. SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z lets customers consolidate distributed workloads onto System z servers to help minimize costs, reduce downtime and data center complexity, and increase flexibility.
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VMware is pricey, esp. Compared to Xen on SLES
“VMware is expensive, but it can save a lot too.” I hear people say that, but I have to wonder if you could be saving more though… Let’s dive in a little deeper to see if indeed there’s more money to be saved by using a virtualization alternative - namely Xen on SLES.
Let me begin by saying: I’m not a VMware pricing expert — so if any of you who read this can correct me, please do. However, today I happened across an article at Forbes.com which caught my attention and described the wonderful benefits of virtualization. The article was really mostly about VMware which is the most common virtualization technology in use today, but towards the end of the article they started talking about how pricey VMware is.
Sesame Workshop - Uses SLES and Xen virtualization to SAVE
Sesame Workshop is also replacing its Sun* Solaris*, Microsoft* Windows* and Debian servers with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server. Since migrating to Linux*, the company has demonstrated dramatic improvement in its Web performance as its home page load time decreased by 130 percent.
“Instead of paying for proprietary hardware with UNIX, we can now get competitive pricing from all the major hardware vendors,” Broadwater said. “Moving to SUSE Linux Enterprise Server gives us the robustness of Linux, as well as the option to run whatever open source tools best fit our business. The cost savings are incredible.”
Read the full press release here.
Bank Deposits Windows in the Recycle Bin
From the article:
Metropolitan Bank Group is a large conglomerate in Illinois, comprising 10 banks and $3 billion in assets. As Metropolitan acquired more banking interests, IT Director Tom Johnson needed to find a way to reduce costs and increase efficiency in the face of the company’s rapid growth. The solution was a migration from Windows to Linux.
Because Metropolitan was growing via acquisitions, Johnson found his IT staff spending large amounts of time bringing remote locations into the company infrastructure and working in the field to provide technical support and troubleshooting. It was expensive to add remote network administration capabilities in Windows, so Johnson decided to move from Microsoft to Novell and SUSE Linux. “We liked the idea of having an open enterprise,” Johnson says, “and an infrastructure able to support anything.”
Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics
I recently came across some Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) information Microsoft has published on their website, showing how using Windows Server gives you a better Return On Investment (ROI) than Linux. Given the ubiquity of Microsoft Windows, you may think that what they have to say would hold a good deal of truth to it. I think the truth is a little closer to "Microsoft makes it as expensive as possible to break out of the lock-in their products create."
