Hi all, I am chiming in a bit late to the discussion, but since Joe mentioned us (CCTV) in the first post, I decided to deposit my .02
At CCTV the decision to run a mainly Linux (Server) shop was made because of the skills we had on hand (mainly me at the time), upfront cost, freedom as in free, and flexibility. I started out running GNU/Linux based services for CCTV on old desktop video editors (couldn't afford servers back then) as they became outmoded for video editing. Pretty quickly I replaced Exchange and our time consuming e-mail infrastructure with Google Apps for non-profits. Then slowly, I retired every old Windows Server OS based service when the age of the machine or its usefulness became outmoded. That left us in 2010 with a bunch of older hardware (6 yr. old video editors), and a few 1-2 yr. old servers running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, and one Windows AD and File sharing setup. We were able to start procuring "real" servers about 3 years ago, and in the intervening time, ran things on bare metal, and played with Ubuntu Orchestra. Once Ubuntu 12.04 LTS came out, we started playing more with virtualization, and explored Ubuntu MAAS and OpenStack. The latter two were too heavy for an IT resouce strapped org. In the end, we made the choice about a year ago to go with a pretty lightweight KVM based infrastructure. Around then, Jessica came on board and we have been moving services to Virtual Machines about as fast as we can manage. We have no Windows servers left, two non-firewall bare metal Linux servers left, and are in the process of picking their services apart now. We currently run almost all services these days on the current Ubuntu Server LTS or CentOS. The ones we don't virtulaize, are that way because they are generally tied to physical hardware (video signal ingest via PCI Express, Firewall with many NIC's). Sometimes if the load on a video ingest machine is consistent 24-7, we also use it as a hypervisor, and reduce accordingly the resources we allocate to the VM's. My few experiments in providing Linux desktops to folks has not been successful, mainly because everyone has their favorite video editing software, and it isn't available for Linux. Even though there are some pretty good FOSS suites out there for video editing and post production, no one wants to retrain themselves, even if there is a similar feature set. This even happened To Final Cut users when Apple came out with FCP X. I have had success using open-source software on Windows or MacOS X, but the reality is that if you are a non-profit and belong to TechSoup, the cost of commercial software licenses for most applications or OS's are just tiny, less than a tenth of retail, and not a significant cost unless you have lots of seats (which we do not). So far we have been slowly replacing the old licensed versions of software with the new FOSS versions (with the exception of video editing, live video switching, and channel playout), and in fact, I recently spied a user running Blender on their editor, having only mentioned this software in passing to them... We may be attacking channel playout next, but there are existing proprietary Linux based solutions out there... so we'll see how that goes. Every organization is different, and a large institution can sometimes afford to "switch it all out", and migrate everything. If you do that you will need a few different and possibly very many different skill sets to manage it. One of the winning attributes for GNU/Linux in our more protracted "remove Windows as it fails/is obsolete" process, was that it happened slowly, and we could immediately reuse hardware with a newer OS with a smaller proportional use of that system's physical computing resources. -andy On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 9:14 AM, [email protected] <[email protected]>wrote: > Munich's switch to Linux has been thoroughly studied. Microsoft even hired > a company to study whether the TCO of the switch was lower than running > Linux . . . and naturally found that they would have been better off > running Windows. That study was widely discredited though - it may some > very strange assumptions, in addition to serious errors. > > That's a complete switch to Linux though, from desktop to server, so it's > not exactly comparable to going from a presumably mixed environment to > purely Microsoft. > > While googling the Munich switch, I also ran across this Wikipedia list of > Linux adopters: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Linux_adopters#Government > > I'm guessing reading further about these switches could provide useful > information about TCO of LInux vs Microsoft. > > If the state is also considering switching to Microsoft also,would that go > against VT's open source software policy from 2010? I'm not familiar with > the details of the policy. > > Asa > On Jun 14, 2013 6:39 AM, "[email protected]" <[email protected]> wrote: > >> I haven't done an analysis of whether they're comparable, either on the >> basis of tech budget- or "computing horsepower per constituent served", but >> UVM's central technology organization (ETS) deploys primarily on Linux with >> commercial support. We are a mixed shop, certainly, but the preponderance >> of ETS-managed servers run Linux. May even support a greater >> "hp"-per-capita-per-dollar ratio than the City... >> >> >> Cheers, >> >> -sth >> >> sam hooker | [email protected] | http://www.noiseplant.com >> Morte infernorum raptor libri moriatur. >> >> On Jun 13, 2013, at 22:30, joe golden <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> > All, >> > >> > it has come to my attention that the city of Burlington is questioning >> the value of non MS based systems and contemplating an all MS shop for the >> city infrastructure and their webservers. There may be security or legal >> reasons that they want to host sites themselves. >> > >> > Are there local organizations with a solid *nix infrastructure that the >> city of Burlington can relate to that we can point to as Open Source >> successes on the technological and financial fronts? As a Burlington >> taxpayer, I appreciate that the city is trying to save $ and I suspect this >> idea is coming in under the "cost savings" umbrella. >> > >> > In this analysis the licensing costs are only one consideration of >> many. Other considerations might be >> > >> > * availability of sys admins >> > * cost of sys administration in time and $ >> > * skill set of current IT employees >> > * system robustness, security and throughput >> > * long term support >> > * hardware costs and availability >> > >> > I know CCTV (Chittenden Community Television) is a Linux shop that >> handles a lot of traffic and has a lot going on with it's tech dept. Where >> are some other *nix success stories on a scale and budget of the City of >> Burlington? >> > >> > Thanx all. >> > -- >> > Joe Golden /_\ www.Triangul.us /_\ Coding, Drupalism and Open Sourcery >> >
