The State of Corporate IT: A case for Linux

Sink, Swim or Tread Water?

The company in this example was at a critical point in the decision making process. They had made the choice some years back to migrate to the NT platform and invested heavily in the infrastructure. But now they were forcing themselves to take a long, hard look at their decision before they would commit any further. Cost analysis had shown that even though the company had poured a great deal of money into software, hardware and institutional retraining, the benefits were not nearly as apparent as promised.

The fact that the NT platform had not proved itself to be as scalable or reliable as promoted was a major thorn in their side. The redundancy suggested by Microsoft had helped increase uptime, but increased the already high maintenance of the growing server clusters. While the previous Unix and Novell platforms had handled file, print and mail servers on a single server, NT now needed one machine for each service plus a dedicated backup for each. Hardware costs were not the real concern - it was the licensing and maintenance requirements that hit the hardest.

The modern workforce was changing, and remote access was becoming much more important for collaborative efforts and virtual workstations. The excessive costs of purchasing licenses for each and every terminal server, remote dial-in and VPN access was simply not going to be possible with the start of the downturn in the tech sector. Though E-commerce was not as explosive as predicted, the web was becoming a very significant tool for internal and external customers alike, not to mention vendors and other third parties. Paying fees for each of these transactions would severely blunt the effectiveness of the entire process, actually making it more cost effective to take a step back and do things the old way.

The company was knee-deep in the mire here, and had to face some tough decisions. Luckily, they had some options. Linux had been gaining a steady groundswell of support over the past few years and had some serious advantages in terms of cost to benefit ratios. Not only was the software free, but it would run on existing hardware and could actually be tweaked and recompiled to maximize performance in key areas such as file and print serving. Plans to advance into a modified agreement with Microsoft were to be put on hold in favor of further exploration into Linux. It would be a decision that they would not regret.