On Mon, 30 Sep 2013 18:20:54 Jeremy Visser wrote:
On 30/09/13 17:51, Peter Nunn wrote:
The Burser, whom I do have some sympathy for, given the amount of crap he's been told, has made the decision that Linux is 'too risky', after consulting other bursers on some network of bursers (god knows) and being advised that "Linux is no good in an education environment, can't get staff, no-one uses it except a few 'out there risk takers'". Of course the M$ suppliers are pushing the same line.
He has a point.
You call up a random IT company — they are a Windows shop. The reality is that there are more Windows shops than Linux shops.
If you are trying to find people who will do the job properly then there's a much more even spread. I don't think that being unable to hire the person who runs the computer store down the street to fix your network is any real loss in terms of being able to have a network run properly.
From his perspective, it’s about redundancy. He can throw out one lot of IT people, replace them with another lot, and they will still be able to support the system.
Sure, there are lots of Linux companies competing in that space. We even have a luv-jobs mailing list where people can find Linux sysadmins.
He can’t find a Linux shop just by walking up the street or finding the first IT company in the Yellow Pages.
As has already been noted you can just do a google search to find a company like Cybersource. If you get Cybersource then things will get done reasonably well. If you get the someone from the store down the street to fix your network then the probability of success is a lot lower. But really the problem schools have is that they have no money to pay good people. A contract to replace a set of PCs in a school and set everything up is going to be profitable enough for a small company. But the ongoing sysadmin work that they really need isn't going to happen at a price that they want to pay. The advantage for Linux here is that you can install things and have them work for longer without being touched and that more sysadmin work can be done remotely. But they still need to pay for work. On Mon, 30 Sep 2013 08:33:19 James Harper wrote:
Basically you don't. Unless you can find a nearby school who is already running Linux and has senior staff willing to vouch for the cost savings they made etc, you aren't going to win this. Schools get MS software so cheap that the cost is unimportant, and doing what everyone else is doing is always the safest option. You need more expensive hardware to run most MS software when comparing to an equivalent Linux solution, but hardware is so cheap these days that that doesn't matter a great deal either.
It's not that the MS software is cheap (sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't). It's that it's someone else's money. Given a choice between spending someone else's money and risking being blamed if something goes wrong with the money saving option most low level people will choose to spend the money. You need someone who has the power to do things to decide to save money. In terms of hardware whether it's more expensive depends on what you are doing. For a basic server something like a Dell PowerEdge T110 will do very well. With 2*3TB disks in a RAID-1 array and 8G of RAM such a system will cost about $1100 - there's not much money to save there, maybe a Linux server would only need 4G but you're saving about $100. If the Windows resource requirements go to something like 64G of RAM (EG for a terminal server) then hardware costs becomes an issue. Probably the biggest benefit for Linux in terms of hardware is that it runs really well on systems that can't run Windows properly. Most of the desktop systems in my house were given to me by clients who replaced them with more powerful systems to run a recent version of Windows. If there is a stockpile of old PCs in a back room they could be installed as Linux workstations. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/