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Technology news and Jobs 
The Linux distillery Vomit or Linux: your choice
The Linux distillery Vomit or Linux: your choice | Vomit or Linux: your choice |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Wednesday, 27 February 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 4 The purchasing officer considered this argument. He challenged the Linux supplier, wondering why they were giving a half-baked solution. No, they explained, Linux could also provide a domain with usernames and passwords through Samba.Taking this argument back to the more mainstream vendors, the reply was unanimous. “Nobody knows Linux,” they said. “You have to pay for support because it’s so obscure. None of your guys could hop on and fix it. That’s where they get you.” The purchasing officer decided they were right. Windows was the safe option; it was the way to go. It cost more, and they had to enter a support contract where the supplier would come on-site once a month to check all was running ok, but it worked. The Linux supplier called to find out why they didn’t get the sale. “I didn’t think your own staff's ability to log on to the server was an issue,” he said. “Hell no,” the purchasing officer said. “They’re not to touch it!” “I see. And are their support charges less than ours?” “No, they are the same price. Except we have to pay them to travel too. Ohhhh .....” he said, as the realisation hit. Not all stories are like this. The second company I spoke to is a large organisation with revenue in excess of $100m. It has five offices and has been growing steadily. The mail and web server was housed in the corporate office with a 2mbps synchronous BDSL network connection. The IT Manager was growing anxious that this network connection was becoming less adequate for servicing all the company’s users. At the same time he worried their disaster recovery plan was not sufficient. He looked into co-location options and found a secure facility in a capital city. It offered a fire, flood and bomb-proof environment with a host of backup power and network options. Physical access was controlled through 24x7x365 security guards. The network speed offered was a 100mb/s Internet connection and a 30mb/s fat connection back to their private WAN. This looked ideal; the building and its facilities were excellent and the bandwidth was phenomenal – particularly at the price, which was orders of magnitudes cheaper than trying for the same speed at the corporate office. So then! A new server was called for! Please read on. CONTINUED
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