network admin TCO

[Eric Eisenhart]

On Thu, Nov 08, 2001 at 03:29:44PM -1000, Brian Lintz wrote:
>    What recent web sites can you people recommend that
> has any explanation for the cost of operating a Linux
> based network? Circa, two years ago I read an article
> that the cost of administering a Linux or Unix based
> network was cheaper (and easier) than administering a 
> Windows NT based network. Today I read an article
> http://www.wininformant.com/Articles/Index.cfm?ArticleID=23086
> in which Intel vice president for information
> technology, Doug Busch, stated that the overall cost
> of Linux is almost identical to that for Windows 2000
> when one factors in support and maintenance. So to what
> sources can you readers direct my attention to verify
> (or refute) this statement by Mr. Busch? Thanks.

I think there's been a number of different reports based on different
research into the topic.  IT departments think about TCO a lot, so IT
consulting firms like to talk about it a lot.

If you have a company with a hundred Windows experts and a few hundred
Windows servers, then one Linux server will be a significant chunk of TCO. 
If you have a bunch of Unix or Linux experts and a bunch of Unix or Linux
servers, then one Windows server will be a significant chunk of TCO.

In other words, the more different types of systems involved the higher the
TCO.  The more you can have a homogonous network with identical machines,
the lower your TCO.  (Ideal would be same hardware, same version of the same
OS at the same patchlevel, etc.  Then you can yank a hard drive out of any
broken computer and put it into any other computer to get your broken
important server back online very quickly)

In my own (Linux/Unix biased) experience, for somebody that knows very
little it's easier to administer one windows box than one Linux box.  For
somebody that knows a decent amount, it's easier for one person to
administer a hundred Unix/Linux boxes than for one person to administer a
hundred Windows boxes.

For example, let's say you have a thousand identical web servers with one
master and you've changed (tested, etc.) the master httpd.conf file and a
few auxillary files, how do you send out those changes?

With Linux, there's several options, the one that you can do with standard
tools that's trivial if you're using ssh-agent:
for i in `cat /etc/servers` ; do rsync -a /etc/apache $i:/etc/apache ; done
There's also "cluster management" software which automates this by giving
you a commands like "psh", and "pcp" that are equivelant to a loop like that
around "ssh" or "scp".

An even easier solution would be for them to pull even their configs off of
an NFS mount, but that's hard to do with good performance for *everything*.

So, how do you change the IIS config on 1000 Windows boxes?  I can think of
some tricks with registry export and import that might work, and I suppose
you can always install an SSH server on those machines to do similar kind of
remote login stuff...
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    Eric Eisenhart   Freedom is slavery.      http://eric.eisenhart.com/
 ^  ICQ#: 48217244   Ignorance is strength.   eric-dot-sig at eisenhart.com
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