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.”
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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.
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