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Re: [school-discuss] Cost comparisons for Linux vs. Windows - retail prices
On Fri, 16 Aug 2002 19:16, Matt Drew wrote:
> Current MS licensing for this level would be Open Licensing. You need
> to purchase a minimum of five licenses to qualify for Open Licensing.
> I'm assuming all Microsoft products. I'll be using the online calculator:
> http://www.microsoft.com/education/default.asp?ID=OpenCalculator
Gotta love the retail pricing. I can't see an equivalent calculator for
Australian prices, so I'll convert USD -> AUD at today's rates and assume
parity pricing.
Office with 50 people, all requiring file sharing (one server), email (one
server) and an internet gateway (one server):
ITEM USD AUD
------------------------------- ----- -----
File server, w2k, 50 seats 2369 (w2k+25 CALs) 4341
+ 2090 (60 CALs) 3829
Email server, w2k, 25 seats 2369 4341
+ 599 (Exch+5 CALs) 1097
+ 550 (45 Exch CAL) 1007
MS-Office 2k 7950 (x50) 14568
Win XP Pro 4950 (upgrade*x50) 9070
Web server, w2k, 25 seats 2369 4341
SQL Server 1059 (w/10 CALs) 1940
------------------------------- ----- -----
TOTAL, *not* including an ICL 24305 44534
and/or extra 40 seats for SQL
proxy server, virus scanner,
or anything else not on the
MS calculator
------------------------------- ----- -----
* Assumes that your workstations come with some form of Windows on them
that is `upgradeable' to XP Pro.
Add at least AUD$50 per PC per year for competent virus scanning.
So... which would you rather, a Microsoft Windows2000 + Exchange + IIS +
Office system not even set up, or a Linux + PostFix + PostgreSQL + Samba/NFS
+ OpenOffice.org system plus 372 hours of my time at full rates (46.5 8-hour
working days) thrown in for free? (-:
Put another way, I could set up their whole system and spend *7*hours*
one-on-one with *every*single*user* getting things `just so' at
*full*consulting*rates* plus do the whole lot on one (duplicated,
replicating, failover) server without raising a sweat and still be cheaper
than Microsoft! And the money stays in the country, in our case, instead of
being exported to the 'States.
Let's come at this still another way. The *minimum* difference in software
licences alone would pay for a 17" LCD screen for every user (at qty 50)
instead of a CRT, an optical mouse instead of a ball mouse, and upping the
RAM in new PCs from 256MB to 512MB.
The power savings on those screens would be at least AUD$18 per working day
(AUD$4500 a year) for the whole office (or AUD$90PA per PC), to say nothing
of power savings from Linux having the CPU halted most of the time anyway.
Bonus, no extra charge, you would have a spare 85GHz Athlon kicking around
for those odd compute-intensive tasks courtesy of OpenMosix.
In terms of installation, in practice, I'd set up three kinds of machines:
vanilla user, power user, and server. Once each. After that, it's kickstart
time! You can even netboot and kickstart from there, so you could concievably
just plug a machine in, power it up, and if it was to be a vanilla machine
just walk away, no intervention necessary. If the machines were distinguished
by hardware (e.g. RAM size), you could also do that for the deluxe
workstations.
If you wanted to really bear down on hardware costs, you would eliminate
floppy drives, and very few machines would have CD drives (those would be
burners). `Vanilla' workstations could be run diskless from a pair of
servers, meaning you could either knock another AUD$120 off each machine for
disks not bought, and if you ran them Terminal Server style you could even
scrimp on RAM (since 32MB is plenty) but I wouldn't bother.
In large installations (hundreds of machines) it would be cost-effective to
run vanilla users in clusters of up to four screens on the one PC, given that
none of them are doing realtime 3D stuff since
Cheers; Leon