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The Linux distillery A case study: Video Ezy and Microsoft myths about open source lead to flawed network
The Linux distillery A case study: Video Ezy and Microsoft myths about open source lead to flawed network | A case study: Video Ezy and Microsoft myths about open source lead to flawed network |
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| by David M Williams | |
| Monday, 21 April 2008 | |
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Page 3 of 3 The argument is given that the Microsoft platform chosen was far more centrally manageable and that it was a platform to lead into the future. What do you think?Yet, anyone who knows SBS will attest it has limitations – of course; after all, it’s designed for, well, small businesses. Is an organisation with 560 outlets small? I’d have thought not. Yet they have crippled themselves by implementing a small business solution. One of the issues with SBS is you can only have one SBS server in your network. If any other servers are required they must be the full Windows Server product. So, there’s no scaling the cost savings of an SBS license; you only get one. Of course, the truth is more likely that Video Ezy didn’t implement a single Active Directory domain across all their sites. Rather, I suspect it is much more likely they designed a single small office network and then replicated this 560 times. So, rather than one big company network and one single set of logins, one single mail server, one single WAN they instead have 560 small networks. What happens when you need to add a new user? You don’t just add them to the central Active Directory, putting them in an appropriate organisational unit. No, instead you remotely connect to the SBS server at the appropriate location and create their account there. That raises another issue; to remotely connect you will need an administrative account and password. It may be the IT team use the built-in administrator login. If so, they either have to maintain 560 passwords or they have set the password to be identical in their standard operating environment and never expire. If this password gets compromised – or a member of the team leaves – you have a big task ahead to change the administrator password throughout the company. Fortunately, the CIO maintains that Windows is superior because it can be centrally administered and doesn’t need local people on the ground. Mind you, at the same time he says Windows is superior because they have more chance of finding local people with Windows knowledge who can come in and resolve problems. Even if we concede the second point to be true – that technicians claiming Windows experience, be it merited or not, are easier to find – the first point is not an argument against Linux. Indeed, Linux is a masterful central environment. It is effortless to link vast numbers of Linux servers together – in a true single platform manner – with centralised reporting and administration and support out of the box. If you need something more one of the world’s top enterprise grade network monitoring and management packages is Zenoss which is open source, free and top quality. It does things which far more costly systems do not. We haven’t even touched on whether this is a state of the art network which scales for the future. Indeed, what does it even have to do with supplying video on demand? That will be an app for a data centre with high bandwidth. The one point in the case study which may be accepted is that outlet staff will be comfortable and familiar with Microsoft Office. There are various options here; sure, it would be easy for me to say they could just use Open Office. However, another solution is that Microsoft Windows be maintained as a desktop platform. This would keep all the users happy. However, a Linux-based server back-end would definitely have given the central administration desired but delivered lower deployment costs. Additionally, unlike a woeful SBS implementation, Linux would have allowed a consolidated network with all the benefits that brings. Indeed, a much better consolidated network could also have been achieved with a full Windows Server roll out and a single Active Directory with multiple domain controllers for failover. I’d expect this option to have been canvassed. The fact Video Ezy went with Small Business Server shows that overall costs had to be controlled. So, a tradeoff was made between an ideal centralised platform with all its administrative benefits and the cost of the solution. The lower cost SBS platform was rolled out, effectively making each branch their own independent domain, but making administration just that much more complex. A pity; if they’d gone with Linux they could have had the idea central administration without the worry of full-blown server operating system licenses throughout. If only they hadn’t relied on an anecdote that said, “This one time, at a place I used to work ....”
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