-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 Slawek Drabot wrote: | Based on the observations made, what do people here see as the biggest pros and cons of using Linux, and specifically Ubuntu in a commercial, corporate environment?
For me personally, speed and reliability are the biggest pros. What do I mean by "speed"? I can roll out fairly complex networks using a Linux environment in a very small amount of time. Take for example a client of mine that was a startup visual effects studio. They needed a centralised authentication system that would allow authentication services for workstations running MacOSX, Windows, Linux and SGI/IRIX, high speed file serving, cross-OS permissions control, VPN access, routing and firewalling, secure wireless network, and a host of other services (databases galore, wikis for knowledge bases, etc) for a network of 20 users/workstations, 4 very large servers and with a decent sized renderfarm and management nodes. Under a proprietary OS, this would have taken ages. I've seen smaller networks with less features and a single OS base take a month or more to roll out. Particularly when you consider you need to waste a huge amount of time on license procurement, software asset/licensing/serial management, auditing of licenses to ensure you are not over or under licensed, etc, etc. I managed all of the above by myself in under 5 days. The whole studio was up and running on a production film within 30 days of the green light, which included hardware purchasing and installation, the software stuff above, and the rest of the administration style activities that normally happen. I used free software like LDAP, SASL, Samba, BIND, OpenVPN, NFS and others to build the core features which allowed all of the systems to plug in without worrying about OS compatibility. The testing performed was minimal and most things "just worked" regardless of attached OS. On the long-term scale, it allows the studio owner to scale his network well over 100 times in size with no extra software cost at the server side. It also meant that we could build in redundancy early on without the need to worry about further licensing restrictions and time delays. I've since worked on similar projects where there has always been an insistence to use proprietary software as the base. Typically this means Microsoft Windows Server and Active Directory. Invariably the result is the same: permissions and user mapping fail when dealing with cross-platform networks (MacOSX and Linux systems don't play as nicely when compared with a standard LDAP system), DNS systems are more difficult to manage, systems like Exchange are limiting in their scalability, performance, and extensibility, and the time to roll out these networks is always blown out by software license management. One I was a part of recently took several months to complete, and had fewer features than the 5-day affair I mention above. And I'm not even going to start talking about the dollar cost (I hate terms like "TCO", as they are far too hand-wavy and belong in the realm of pointy haired bosses only). The "reliability" part has been fantastic. The network in question has been functional for 1.5 years now, and we are planning various upgrades and extensions that are going to be equally as trivial to implement thanks to the redundant nature of the network, which in turn is thanks to the free software driving it. - -Dan -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFIXyfzeFJDv0P9Qb8RAttYAKCcfZG1FUGLjnOy3FBUkI4SLcP8VgCggjj1 VmjAwcc8t8WYWy0kHG24638= =dSaf -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- ubuntu-au mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-au
