Softpanorama (slightly skeptical) Open Source Software Educational Society

May the source be with you, but remember the KISS principle ;-)

The decisive influence of the pre-existing Unix "ecosystem" on the costs of adoption of any new Unix flavor

All large enterprises already have Unix and Windows presence. Typical Unix flavors include but are not limited to AIX, HP-UX and Solaris. The most common in large enterprize environment that when enterprize uses several of them: two is a quite typical situation, but presence of all three is not that uncommon (in case of large acquisitions sometimes it is impossible to merge system into "adopted" flavors on Unix for years).

That means that adding linux in large enterprise environment always means "implanting" additional flavor of Unix (or two if both Red Hat and Suse are used) into the existing Unix "ecosystem."  And it usually means an increase of the number of individual flavors of Unix in this mix, the factor that paradoxically tend to increase, not decrease the TCO. The author argues that any number of Unix flavors above two generally leads to the substantial increase of TCO.  Often this is a dramatic increase in comparison with Unix ecosystems consisting of just two Unix flavors due to complex interplay of several factors. Among them:

1. Quality of service requirements generally make difficult for specialists to work with more then two flavor on Unix simultaneously (two is probably optimal number of flavors of Unix that can be mastered by an average enterprise Unix administrator).  In this respect in any large enterprise that already uses at least two flavors of Unix adding any additional flavor (not necessarily Red Hat of Suse, adding Solaris to AIX and HP-UX mix produced the same result) significantly stretches existing workforce. Such a stretch either deteriorates the quality of system management or creates the necessity to free people who will specialize in this particular Unix flavor; that may require adding to the administrators head count. Addition of just two administrators essentially evaporates any $200K economy on hardware in less then two years. Also good Red Hat (or Suse) administrators are rare and expensive breed.
    

2. Level of qualification of personal that needs to service more then two flavors of Unix usually remains low and that opens the enterprise to the necessity of using  expensive outside  "professional services" on a regular basis. Modern Unixes are very complex OSes. With three or more flavors of UNIX to service, administrators just spend too much time switching between the environments and learning their idiosyncrasies to raise their professional level above the entry level.  The level of "know-how" that an enterprise possesses also suffers dramatically. 
   
   That's schizophrenic "multiple personalities" of Unix problem is well known and we will not elaborate on it further, but unless the level of schizophrenia is controlled it can became a major problem and lead to substantial costs overhead. It can be somewhat  alleviated by additional investments in training, but the core problem of human limitations remains. Usually such enterprises became too dependent on external support and consultants, two factors that substantially inflate costs. 
   
   The cases when large professional services organizations charge the enterprise customers more then $200 per hour for a decent (but nothing to boast about) consultant are not that uncommon. This situation reminds a popular joke about Tivoli: "Yes, there are substantial savings from Tivoli deployment, but they are never visible as all of them go back to IBM in consulting costs."
   
   Any enterprise that deploys excessive variety of Unix flavors is a natural target for this modern kind of  "technology mortgage payments", interests payments on technology that they cannot afford and that do not change much from adding words "open source" or linux to some papers. Like in natural world predators hunt mainly weak and/or sick animals :-). 

Created Jan 2, 2005.  Last modified: February 28, 2008