Mindbridge Saves "Bunches of Money" In Switch To Linux 177
While Mindbridge didn't start out as an open source company, it has since managed to save what they can only describe as "bunches of money" by switching to Linux. "Today, Mindbridge has repurposed itself as an open-source-friendly company, and revamped its infrastructure to run completely on Linux and other open source software. 'Having deployed [Linux servers] to our customers, we turned around and said, we can do the same thing internally and save bunches of money. We began a systematic but slow flipping of servers from the Microsoft world over to predominantly Linux — although there are a few BSD boxes around as well,' Christian says. 'It's to the point that today I only have two production Windows servers left, out of 15 or so.'"
Headline (Score:3, Funny)
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Was it good for you?
Not news (Score:5, Interesting)
Business as usual is when companies adopt Linux for practical business reasons. It happens all the time in the valley, probably because there are many IT guys here with the experience to manage large networks of Linux, BSD, etc machines.
Re:Not news - your right (Score:2)
probably because there are many IT guys here with the experience to manage large networks of Linux, BSD, etc machines.
And growing.
It isn't the IT technical types holding up Linux deployment. It is the CIO that likes lobster with MS sales and the people who know nothing of OSes including MS. Maybe a little to do with "bundling". Thought that was illegal, but OK for M$. The last thing I/T wants to do change and learn. Like when the PCs came in, I/T was the last to adopt. When Linux comes in, I/T will
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But when it all boils down to it, a good CIO will switch to any technology if he can be convinced that it saves him money, time and improves reliability (and therefor the perception that he is doing a good job).
As long as he doesn't have to give up the machine on his desktop that took him 5 years to figure out how to open up a spreadsheet. (you can train any animal to do almost any trivial ta
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With a basic gnu/linux system you can get mailserver/fileserver/webserver/development software all for free, if the knowledge to maintain it internally.. If not the support-contracts for those systems are not that big.. And if you are running gnu/linux on the servers in a company it will
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VMWare ESX is a standalone OS that gives you almost the full performance of the actual hardware without having a underlying OS doing all sorts of stuff that will slow down the virtual-machines..
And IMHO all disk-management in windows is crap... If you want to take tha
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windows fanbois (Score:3, Insightful)
A computer costs $300, and the license for the OS is like $200. Plus licenses for Exchange and the file servers, domain controllers, etc you need to support all those desktops. Plus the software and add-ons for Windows cost money while the equivalent ones for linux/bsd/solaris are free.
Some companies do a cost analysis, and occasionally find out it's cheaper to run Linux for their specific situation. Shooting from the hip and saying it's always cheaper or that it
Brings real credibility to the Linux fanboys ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's not bother to actually QUANTIFY "bunches of money" or do any kind of cost/benefits analysis and just make a headline out of it to get some free publicity.
Obviously nobody has done any kind of credible study on the TOTAL cost of ownership. YA, just train a few admins and we're good to go. No extra costs there. Sure, customers want Microsoft, and we'll give it to them if they want to pay extra. We don
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This story is utterly pointless.
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You just trying to continue the theme with your post?
Eh, no. It's "Guy with 60 Windows servers" (Score:5, Interesting)
See Microsoft's problem now? See the point?
Say, did you graduate high school? Your reading skills seem to be lacking, it's right there in paragraph 3 of the article. Oh wait! I get it you didn't RTFA and decided to spout of anyway. Oh and the mods, good job there.
As you were.
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Windows Servers Are Like Rabbits (Score:2)
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Are you implying that Linux is inherently less secure than Windows?
I don't think so. A properly administered Linux box is just as secure as a properly administered Windows box.
Please don't spread FUD.
Re:Not too bad for little guys (Score:5, Insightful)
ACLs are complex, to the point that many windows admins dont bother with them. Unix permissions are simple enough to master but lack some of the flexibility. However, for most purposes permissions are more than adequate, and you also have ACLs if you need more.
But wtf is this about network security? Linux has iptables by default, ssh for communications between machines, NFSv4 for file sharing...
Compare that to windows file sharing, which is vulnerable to reflection attacks (see metasploit) and will automatically send your authentication details when you connect to a remove server!
Not to mention all the stuff windows has open by default (rpc, netbios, netbios-ns, and more), and which is difficult to turn off. Linux boxes, unless horribly misconfigured, will only listen on the services which are required, with unnecessary services turned off rather than kludgily filtered.
Re:Not too bad for little guys (Score:4, Informative)
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also, if you want to argue about directory services only, AD is just a borgified ldap with lots of non-standard extensions
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File-sharing... NFSv4 is starting to get very good now but maybe not there yet, so go with NFS and automounter, if you want a bit more security just add a ipsec-tunnel and let you NFS traffic flow... You could probably also add some additional security to this by having the clients use keys stored in the LDAP and received when the user logs
Linux... (Score:5, Funny)
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I don't see how OSS can take over Microsoft or Microsoft take over OSS.
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Re:Linux... (Score:4, Funny)
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Scale (Score:5, Insightful)
Fifteen minutes could save you fifteen percent or more on your operational cost.
Dropping the number of computers needed to do a job by an order of magnitude will save you more than 15%. The time spent nursing sick servers is better spent making new product for more revenue.
When you are big enough, 15% is a big deal. Walmart, for example, has more revenue than any company besides Exxon [cnn.com], but is only able to keep 3% of it. If they were able to drop their costs by 15%, they would have proffits five times M$'s.
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Shouldn't that be 15 Linux could save you fifteen percent or more on your operational cost.
Would have saved more (Score:2, Insightful)
Would have spent more at any price. (Score:5, Insightful)
To make up the difference, M$ would have to give them the software, pay the electric bill and donate engineering time for custom applications. If you read the article, you will see that the company dropped from at least 60 servers to 15. I say at least, because the only count they give of how much hardware they were using is the 50 or 60 that "were giving them trouble." It's clear that time spent nursing that mess was better spent moving to software that works better and allows easier customization. Their continued good results with other software proves their competence as well as the poor quality of what they were using before. Quality that poor is a bad deal unless it's heavily subsidized, so your imagined extortion can only work for a few prominent customers. When that does work, the rest of the customers will pay that much more to keep M$'s profit to revenue ratio at 35%.
Wrong architecture (Score:2)
Really. Think about the mathematics of that situation. Think about the relationships between the machines, work out the complexity. As far as I can see there are a lot of CEOs and CIOs out there who simply can't multiply two numbers together. And if they can't do that...
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what the.... (Score:3, Funny)
In other news (Score:4, Insightful)
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Actually, as I've met some really ignorant 12-year-olds, I'd have to lean more toward the good ol'-fashioned OR, IMHO.
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Yep, and the ratio of software cost to support cost for both Windows and Linux is roughly the same...
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Re:In other news (Score:4, Insightful)
In addition more hardware can mean more potential security breaches, and so forth.
Real company - just 15 servers? (Score:4, Funny)
Is this "Mindbridge" a real company? I know geeks with 15 servers in their basement...
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15 servers where I work is barely a ROUNDING ERROR
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Goto any technical school school and you might find one in most dorm rooms!
I have one heating my room this winter in addition to my laptop.
Re:Real company - just 15 servers? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is this "Mindbridge" a real company? I know geeks with 15 servers in their basement...
I don't know what business they are in (Safari crashes on TFA), but then: I have a very real company, two of them even, and I have only one server. It's doing what I need. But then I'm not in the business of selling web access, or server space, or so. Most companies have only one or two servers, because most companies are not in the business of selling server space. Besides, modern servers can handle a huge lot of work, one server now can easily handle what 10 servers did a decade or so ago.
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Mindbridge Software
Only a REAL company could string so many meaningless buzzwords together!
Technical question (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Technical question (Score:5, Insightful)
*Old model, not new model. As everyone knows, substantially fewer circus clowns fit into the newer models, due to reduced trunk space and assorted government regulations regarding imports from Mexico.
This story has no credibility (Score:5, Insightful)
They're a Linux company. They're telling us how great Linux is. They're not giving any details.
Personally, I have quite a bit of experience operating, maintaining, and supporting both Linux and Microsoft servers. I have found that both work well for the vast majority of applications. I've found other people's Linux servers to be easier to support than other people's Microsoft servers, but this might just be because the average Linux server contact is more knowledgeable than the average Microsoft server contact.
One huge difference is that it is *much* easier to figure out what a Linux server is doing and to start analyzing why it's not doing what it's supposed to do.
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No, they aren't a Linux company. They don't sell Linux and their own products are not Linux-specific. The article says that they started out as a Microsoft shop but switched most of their servers to Linux after observing their customers' good experience with Linux.
Re:This story has no credibility (Score:5, Insightful)
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The quotes are so extensive that unless the article is making them up it is clear that the article reflects the point of view of Mindbridge, not merely Linux.com's spin. In any case, if the OP had meant to refer to the article, he ought to have written "Linux.com" or "the publication". The obvious referent of "the company" is Mindbridge, the company discussed in the article.
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Well, it's not no numbers but they're definitely lower than before.
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Not that I'm saying this article is as bad as most of those articles. It's not. No specifics is a lot better than completely false and misleading specifics pulled out of your corporate ass or intentionally deceptive test methodologies you pick but then get a "neutral third-party" to perform so they will "fairly and without b
light on detail .. (Score:2)
'part of this open source initiative, we also chose a virtual machine called Xen, which allows us to put multiple machines on one physical server [linux.com], to consolidate
"Personally, I have quite a bit of experience operating, maintaining, and su
The story is rather misleading...! (Score:5, Insightful)
Emphasis mine by the way; the two words in bold appear to be contradictory...or are they?
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Strictly speaking, yes, it's a contradiction. He should have said "almost completely". Big deal. It hardly invalidates the story.
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I am unable to make any sense of your comment. You asked whether the words are contradictory. I agreed that they are. I then went on to point out that it makes no real difference to the point of the article. No, you didn't use the word "invalidate", but your title does say that the article is "misleading", which amounts to the same thing in this context. Use whatever words you like, but the fact remains that his description of his experience does not depend on whether the conversion was complete or almost
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The story is rather misleading...!! (Score:2)
I would guess you are 100% corrrect about that. But aren't DCs and email servers a very central part of the infrastructure? If those 2 things are still Windows boxes then I'd say there are 2 large and very critical aspects of their infrastructure that rely on Windows servers.
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choice quotes from TFA (Score:4, Interesting)
when you buy from Microsoft, you can assume it works with other Microsoft products.
Assume?! MS is known for all sorts of lock in. Of course their products work with each other! But only the most recent versions, that too is key to MS's overall strategy. It's when you don't want to upgrade or they don't have some need covered that you're out of luck. 3rd party stuff that works with MS is always chancy. Never know when MS might make an internal change and break half the 3rd party stuff as well as old MS stuff.
Can such a person exist? A system administrator who has to get used to the idea of command lines?!
Sounds like the way we wish hiring decisions were made. Sounds too good to be true.
Re:choice quotes from TFA (Score:4, Informative)
Only a very bad one. Knowing how to write a decent
Real Company? (Score:5, Interesting)
Our annual sales exceed $1 million dollars this year, we've been growing 40% - 70% annually. No, we're not a megacorp, but still quite legit. (and our servers are all 100% Linux)
I, for one (Score:2)
OSDN cross-promotion (Score:1)
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yea, they have to be lying
What really happened... (Score:5, Interesting)
I've see that story dozens of times with the (insert OS here) being Linux or Windows.
asp and .net (Score:2)
It's not a hard choice, just perhaps costly. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's only a legitimately difficult decision to make when a company doesn't have Unix expertise. (Which is often.) Pay the cost to replace your IT staff, or pay the cost to rent software from Microsoft?
I wish people would do cost/benefit analyses on this latter point. After all, everyone knows Unix is cheaper. But is it cheaper than replacing your Win32 GUI point-n-click admins with their Unix replacements? I honestly have no clue... and I suspect it really depends upon the company, the culture, the size, the market, etc.
These "I switched to Linux and I saved money articles" are old and meaningless.
"I switched my career from real-estate to oncology and now I make more money!" Great, but what's the real-world cost of doing so, if it's not already a simple option?
(I'm a multi-platform guy with a hybrid environment at home, so save your breath if you're going to point the Finger of Anti-Linux SentimEnt at me.)
Complex decission (Score:5, Interesting)
But is it cheaper than replacing your Win32 GUI point-n-click admins with their Unix replacements?
In terms of personnel it's not always fair to compare admins dollar for dollar. If I've got an admin who can run a Linux environment that performs reliably with a minimum of downtime, that person is worth more to me. They are saving me thousands in licensing costs and thousands more in potential headaches. They're saving me from vendor lock-in, which might be worth a lot somewhere down the road. With Linux I can scale at will instead of the headache of trying navigate Microsoft's byzantine license fees and restrictions. How much is that worth?
It's worth a lot of money to me to keep Microsoft out the mix, not all companies see it that way. Like with any commodity, value is a perception based on a point of view.
Then there are the intangibles. A vendor calls with some zippy-dippy piece of software that's going to make my life so much easier. It's so funny to ask, "Does it run on Linux? Because that's all we use here." Used to be that was inevitably followed by a long pause, not as much lately. More companies are answering that they do support Linux. Which has kind of taken some of the fun out of sales calls. "You don't have any Windows servers?"
Hehe. Priceless.
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Problem is "point and click" admins are usually completely incapable to troubleshoot anything. Do you want them to keep reinstalling drivers when the problem is flaky ethernet cable ?
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I wish people would do cost/benefit analyses on this latter point. After all, everyone knows Unix is cheaper. But is it cheaper than replacing your Win32 GUI point-n-click admins with their Unix replacements? I honestly have no clue... and I suspect it really depends upon the company, the culture, the size, the market, etc.
While a competant Unix admin will tend to be more expensive than a Windows admin, you'll need less of them to get the job done. While Unix requires more knowledge to reach entry level
whenever a positive article about Open Source (Score:2)
the biggest deal ... (Score:2)
No, the biggest challenge would have been sysadmins capable of doing basic math.
Now lets see... from 60+ servers to 15 (*), reduction of at least 75%.
((*)15 PHYSICAL servers, plus a few VIRTUAL ones thanks to Xen. Still a significant reduction)
Even if you keep the same admin/server ratio that's a change of admin staff of..... let me do the math.....
To aid the process, Christian looked specifically for new hires who were eager
Remember Folks (Score:2)
In the complex world of IT, neither closed source nor open-source is the perfect solution for everything.
Re:Remember Folks (Score:4, Interesting)
Other cost savings (Score:4, Interesting)
Not News (Score:2)
In the long run Linux servers are much, much cheaper. We have servers that have been running for over 440 days without an issue and these are Redhat 7.3 servers. No viruses, no worms, no break-ins, nothing.
Again? (Score:2)
Three-card Monte with Win 2k Server (Score:3, Interesting)
OK, now I've been schooled by some of the best on this particular server - in Seattle, mind you, so I got a pretty good handle on this, but hey, I'm no Mark Russinovich.
So, on this "other OS" I was able to quite easily find all things "Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Server", home page, oodles of info.
Jump on the 2000 Server and off to the download section of MS, [Windows Update and Microsoft Update don't work without IE 6] 20 mins of clicky-clicky and I'm getting nowhere. Weirdly, the word "server" is absent where I'd done the same search earlier on that "other OS".
Three-card Monte:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-card_Monte [wikipedia.org]
Next, IE 6.1 SP1.
The stub doesn't work, [as usual] so I try the Run trick for the full update, ("C\Download\iesetup.exe
Broke.
[not to mention the frequent STOP errors, disk controller errors, etc. on known good hardware]
4 hours on just this. FOR A FUCKING BROWSER UPDATE.
OH LOOK:
Great, some help!
AutoPatcher 2000 August 2007 Core Release & Update:
http://www.softpedia.com/get/System/OS-Enhancemen
AutoPatcher description
AutoPatcher 2000 requires Windows 2000 SP4 to be installed (works with Windows 2000 Pro, Server, & Adv. Server)
"August 29, 2007: The development of the Autopatcher project was officially ceased today, when the Microsoft Legal department contacted the Autopatcher team demanding them to put an immediate stop to any further releases. For more details, please read this article."
Classsssy.
Along the way, I got great offers for Windows 2003 Server, lots of links - rich content
Here's the punch line Guys and Gals:
Like Sony - I'm banning Microsoft, Windows and all things Redmond from our office. I've wasted my time before [and we formally quite supporting Windows here], but this is the last time I do this - it's ALL going, lock, stock and barrel, down to the books and the media it resides on, OUT.
I don't have these problems on the "other" servers - period {.}.
I'm ripping this install out and installing Linux or Solaris, fuck it, at least if I have trouble I haven't got people trying to hide the software I need to get the GOD DAMNED thing running.
Thank you for your attention.
I feel MUCH better.
hylas
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Cue Linux Missionaries starting to mod me down as a troll in 3..2..1..
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You need to see Ubuntu, using fedora is akin to jamming icicles in your eyes using only a toothpick for grip in comparison. As for video drivers, nvidia are easy enough, in ubuntu it takes two clicks to install the commercial drivers. ATI drivers still suck but yesterday or the day before there was an announcement that AMD is going to completely open the specs on the ATI drivers that means there will be fully optimized and funct
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That is tough.
But adding this:
Makes it easy. Linux is at least as easy to use as Windows, but people are used to Windows, so there is a learning curve on switching.
If she switched to Linux you would have a whole lot of calls for help to start with, but that would gradually wind down to a lower level than
Get your mom a Mac (Score:2)
Once she's used to one UNIX desktop, switching to another will be easier.
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Do you think this is the only topic where that comment has been made?
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When I walk home every day (I can't afford a car, or public transportation) the public shower
me with rose petals, accolades and proclamations of my uber froobiness. Why?
Because by God, Microsoft, Church and Apple Pie I built my PC with Windows Ultimate Edition!
Sure it cost a little more and there was that dark spell where I just ate Ramen noodles
Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, and sucked on the salt packets Tuesdays and Thursdays
but dang it I needed the best, the very best OS in the
That's brilliant (Score:2)
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Do you think Microsoft would like to post it on MSN to get more pageviews?
Thank You very much. I'll be here all week.
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