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The real cost of switching to
Linux
Is the total cost of ownership really lower than Unix
or Windows?
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The jury is in. After
years of experimentation with Linux in the enterprise, customers,
analysts, and vendors are starting to sing a consistent tune about
where Linux makes financial sense and where it doesn’t.
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Although Linux is
often thought of as a free alternative to established OSes such as
Windows and proprietary Unix
is it really cheaper when you
add the costs of acquisition, migration, operation, and support? In
other words, is the TCO (total cost of ownership) of Linux really
lower than that of Unix or Windows?
The simple answer is
this: The more fully an enterprise adopts Linux across its
infrastructure, the more financial leverage it is likely to get out
of up-front investments in the OS. Those investments, which can be
considerable, include Linux training and tools, and the costs of
migrating from a Unix or Windows environment. And that financial
leverage is improving steadily as better management tools, more
third-party vendor support, and more skilled Linux system
administrators arrive on the market.
But the cost and benefit
of switching are not equal for everyone. Unix-to- Linux migrations
typically make financial sense because retraining costs are minimal
while hardware acquisition costs drop significantly. In green-field
situations or for shops running a mish-mash of OSes, Linux can be a
total financial no-brainer. But Windows-to-Linux migrations are more
of a toss-up due to higher retraining and conversion costs, and
lower hardware acquisition cost savings.
ROI or
TCO?
Figuring out the TCO of Linux is not for the faint of
heart. Several IT execs told us they skipped the exercise because
the model would have been very complex, with too many unknowns and
assumptions. “It’s really hard to break Linux TCO down. It’s such a
fluid environment,” says Ray Duncan, M.D., technology director at
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. “It’s hard to get a
side-by-side comparison.”
Laef Olson, an economist by
training, decided to build a TCO model. “I just sat down with a
blank spreadsheet and started making assumptions,” says Olson,
currently vice president of technology for Cars.com, a division
of Classified Ventures. “Annual traffic growth. What do I pay
for Web server CPUs? How many sys admins do I need per physical
machine, and where will tools discount that down the
road?”
Olson calculates that migrating to Linux would yield
“a seven-figure savings” for Cars.com over a four-year period,
assuming 20 percent to 25 percent annual traffic growth and a cost
of capital (which he declined to reveal). But he notes that his
model contained a few big “ifs,” such as the availability of Linux
OS support from key third-party vendors. “A lot of it has to do with
where you think the industry is going,” he explains.
Another
important question is whether to focus on TCO or ROI when evaluating
Linux. Most industry studies have focused on TCO — the all-inclusive
costs of running specific workloads such as Web serving, file and
print, and security applications. But that is changing. Robert
Frances Group this year switched from doing Linux TCO analysis to
ROI analysis.
“TCO doesn’t examine what you could save, what
flexibility it will provide you, how much money you could make,”
explains Chad Robinson, a senior analyst at the Robert Frances
Group. “Those are the reasons you deploy something.” Moreover,
adopting Linux usually includes one-time, up-front migration costs
such as retraining and application integration, costs that are
included in TCO but can only really be evaluated by looking at
ROI.
“If TCO triples but ROI doubles then it should be
deployed. You end up saving in the long run,” Robinson
explains.
No matter which model you use, the financial
benefit of switching to Linux from Unix or Windows is driven by four
main cost categories: acquisition, migration, management, and
support. Here are highlights of key issues in each of these
areas.
Hardware and Software Costs
The benefit of
replacing expensive RISC processor-based Unix hardware with
commodity Intel boxes is one of the biggest factors driving Linux
adoption. “Discount retailing’s a tight business, and we’re wicked
cheap,” explains Burlington Coat Factory CIO Mike Prince, who has
deployed about 2,400 Linux machines over the past three years,
replacing many Unix systems. “Instead of having a superhorse you
have a team of horses — you don’t have to have this genetic [RISC]
wonder.”
It’s an easy calculation. “Moving Unix workloads to
Linux is a no-brainer because of the Intel economics,” says Ted
Schadler, principal analyst at Forrester Research. “If you look at
the all-in cost of deploying Unix on RISC versus that same workload
on an HP or Dell box, it’s between a 5K and 25K price
improvement.”
On the software side, the cost differential is
less clear. Studies by IDC, Meta Group, and Robert Frances Group
find that Linux license costs are lower than those of Windows.
But some analysts argue it’s not an apples-to-apples
comparison. “When you’re building apps,” notes Forrester’s Schadler,
“it’s not a Windows versus Linux decision. It’s a Java-on-Linux
versus Windows decision. Microsoft bundles a lot of stuff into
Windows, into SQL Server, into the .Net framework — if you’re
looking to build a generic app and deploy it at an all-in price
point, Windows is going to win hands down because you get so much
bundled in.”
On both the hardware and software side, an often
overlooked cost advantage of Linux is the flexibility it provides in
terms of future migration and upgrade paths. “With Linux, you
control your own upgrade cycle,” Robinson says.
Migration
Costs
When contemplating a move from Unix or Windows to
Linux, enterprises should take a hard look at the one-time migration
costs. One of the biggest expenses is training systems
administrators to get up to speed on Linux.
“You can
correlate systems knowledge with age,” explains Avery Lyford, CEO of
Linuxcare, which develops management software for Linux
environments. “It’s a gross generalization, but if you talk to
someone in their 20s, they know Linux; in their 30s, they know
Microsoft; in their 40s, Unix; in their 50s, big systems like VMS
[Virtual Memory System].” So in theory, Lyford says, you could gauge
your Linux migration costs by figuring out the average age of your
system administrators.
In reality, Unix skills are closer to
Linux skills, which lowers the cost of migrating from Unix to Linux.
“If you’re a pure NT shop, and you don’t have any Linux skills, then
the barrier is a heck of a lot higher,” Lyford says. “All the Unix
people instantly get Linux.”
Those with Unix skills who don’t
catch on right away can easily download and try it at home. “You get
to build the skills up for free on your own spare-time nickel,”
Lyford notes.
The ability to freely download Linux also makes
it easier to prototype potential deployments, a gap that Microsoft
is aiming to equalize. “I need to make it easier for people to try
to do things on my stuff, to try to build a scenario or an
environment,” says Martin Taylor, Microsoft’s general manager of
platform strategy . “One of the issues that causes people to not
take a full picture on [Linux costs] is they download something for
free and they invest time to get it where they want it. They don’t
fully account for the time and effort it took to even get their
model scenario up and running.”
Other migration costs include
code that may have to be rewritten, data that must be migrated,
integration work to back-end systems, and software that must be
purchased to replicate a capability that already exists on the
platform Linux is displacing.
“There were a lot of costs I
didn’t expect— hidden migration costs,” says Cedars-Sinai’s Duncan.
During the migration from NT to Linux, his staff insisted that
because they had been running RAID disk mirroring and striping on NT
they should buy SCSI RAID controllers for the Linux servers. “It was
like $1,000 per box extra that I hadn’t planned on.”
One-time
migration costs will be lower if your application already runs on
top of middleware that will easily port to Linux, such as an
application server.
“Modern development practices and cycles
are helping reduce the migration cost,” Robinson
notes.
Management Costs
By far the biggest cost in
most Linux TCO studies is the staffing required for ongoing
operational systems management. In a 2002 Windows vs. Linux study
produced by IDC (and sponsored by Microsoft), staffing accounted for
62 percent of the total five-year cost for both environments. It
also made up the biggest cost difference between the two, with
Windows coming out ahead at a slightly lower cost.
Although
most analysts believe Windows administrators cost less than Linux
systems admins, the real debate centers around the cost benefits of
consolidation, and the availability and quality of management
software tools for the Linux platform.
“The operational
savings vary wildly,” says Dave Dargo, vice president of Oracle’s
Linux Program Office. “Customers [who] simply adopt Linux side by
side with their other OSes probably won’t see savings.”
He
makes the consolidation argument: If you move wholesale to Linux and
buy or build robust management tools, you can save more with Linux
than with proprietary Unix or Windows because Linux management tools
and personnel skills can be leveraged across a wider target
(servers, mainframes, and desktops). Because Linux developers have
unfettered access to the Linux OS, fewer administrators are needed
to manage more machines and greater workloads.
The only
problem with this scenario for large Unix shops, says DuWayne
Mutchler, director of enterprise hosting at EDS, is that some of
those tools don’t exist. “The argument that Linux is cheaper to
operate is one we struggle with,” Mutchler says. “The tools and
processes and the automation capabilities have not evolved as far as
they have for Unix, so we’re finding zero cost savings in moving to
Linux.” Of EDS’s 50,000 servers, less than 2 percent are running
Linux.
Cedars-Sinai’s Duncan has also found some key
cost-saving tools missing, although he’s generally happy with his
organization’s migration to Linux. “Backups have been a nagging
problem,” says Duncan, who notes that the medical center had been
using a hot backup agent for Oracle databases on AIX and NT as part
of IBM’s Tivoli Storage Manager but that this agent was not yet
available for Linux. “That is kind of annoying that we can’t use our
standard backup methodology on Linux yet.” Duncan also found that
SAN support for servers could be problematic.
One management
cost area where Linux seems to consistently trump Windows is the
cost of managing security. A big driver for Cedars-Sinai’s switch to
Linux was “the tremendous amount of churn we have on our NT
servers,” due to hot fixes, service packs, and so on, Duncan
says. “We did an analysis of the amount of time we were spending
tweaking NT servers, and it really was kind of terrifying. We should
be able to set up a server and just leave it alone — we really got
into Linux from that point of view.”
Linux is “virtually
virus-free,” Burlington Coat Factory’s Prince agrees, “and it’s
pretty difficult for people to screw up their
systems.”
Support Costs
The final major cost item in
the debate over Linux TCO is support. Linux proponents claim Linux
support is cheaper and available from a more diverse vendor
population, and that Linux machines often run for years without so
much as a reboot anyhow.
“Sun provides fantastic support on
their equipment, and you pay dearly for it,” says Cars.com’s Olson.
But when one of his new Linux machines breaks down, his staff either
replaces it because that approach is cheaper than a fix, or they
turn to what he calls “Google service,” looking on Web newsgroups
and message boards for the solution. “People are willing to share
their experiences. You can find out a lot
quickly.”
Enterprises are overcoming their initial suspicion
of this support method. “Early on, Linux support was an inhibitor to
enterprise adoptions,” says Robinson. “Now it’s turning into a
strong point.”
Users can choose support from their hardware
or software vendor, distribution vendor, or a third party. “That’s
possible with Windows, but [with] the Microsoft solution, providers
can’t actually make a change to Windows for you,” Robinson says.
“All of the [Linux] support vendors are equally
empowered.”
Other Cost Contingencies
Although it is a
factor hard to put into a spreadsheet, current and potential Linux
users are also concerned about future cost risks associated with
Linux’s ownership and development path. Some worry about how the SCO
lawsuit will play out. SCO claims that Linux infringes on its
intellectual property and is trying to collect license fees from
enterprise Linux users.
Although few expect the outcome of
this controversy to have an impact on Linux TCO, the surrounding
uncertainty is affecting how some enterprises might time their
adoption of Linux.
Others worry that the Linux upgrade path
will fragment as vendors develop proprietary flavors. “The Linux
industry needs to stay focused on what made it successful — the open
source Linux platform,” says Anthony Hill, CTO of Golden Gate
University. If it fragments, “the economies of scale equation get
diluted.”
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