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Linux/Microsoft costs

Story: Study: Linux and Windows Costs EqualTotal Replies: 1
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doctorsuse

Sep 26, 2006
11:37 AM EDT 		I work at a company which has approximately 450 desktops and 5 on-site servers. The IT is contracted to EDS. The annual service cost per desktop is ~$1200 CDN. When this is added to the cost of renting the machines, the annual cost per desktop is ~$1650 CDN (for Dell machines which could be purchased new for $800/ea including monitors). So this brings the total annual cost for the desktops to ~$750K CDN. This spirals up to an annual cost of about $1.4 million CDN once the servers and access to other servers on the network are factored in.

With this system, we are faced with a constant stream of desktop and server reboots due to MS OS patches and virus/spyware software updates.

I have looked at Novell's proposal for SLE ($50/desktop, $350/server). For our system licensing and support costs would be less than $30K CDN annually. This would also avoid the security issues and constant reboots required to keep the MS system mostly free of viruses, etc.

So, by my crude analysis, $1.4 E6 - $3.0 E4 = $1.37 million CDN saving per year (after purchasing hardware and writing it off as a capital cost). Even after purchasing all the hardware, we would still save over $500 K CDN during the first year, not including the tax deduction.

In my humble opinion, Linux would be therefore much cheaper and more secure for our company. But , unfortunately, I do not get to make decisions of this magnitude. I just make myself feel better and more secure by running nothing but openSUSE and Kubuntu on my home systems.
SFN

Sep 26, 2006
12:29 PM EDT 		Well sure, but that's in Canada.

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