From: Mike '/m' 


http://news.com.com/2100-1016_3-1014287.html?tag=fd_top

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SANTA CLARA, Calif.--Merrill Lynch research shows that deploying Linux
internally that could save the company millions of dollars, an executive at
the investment banker said.

During a presentation Friday at the Enterprise Linux Forum, Mark Snodgrass,
vice president of Merrill Lynch's in-house technology provider, the Global
Technology & Services group, said that the company has found that
re-architecting its information infrastructure using Linux can reduce
administration costs dramatically.

In fact, Snodgrass found that, while the software licensing costs of
Windows was higher than Linux, the highest cost was in managing traditional
Windows infrastructure.

"It's the people that cost the most," he said.

Merrill Lynch's new plans for its information infrastructure call for
running much of its Linux applications not on their own physical machines
but in virtual machines running on high-end servers. Such a scheme
simplifies management and allows for rapid deployment of new Linux
"servers" by activating a copy of a stored pre-configured image
in as little as 2 minutes 14 seconds.

"We are not trying to promote Linux," Snodgrass said. "We
are just trying to reduce the cost of ownership."

Using such virtual Linux servers to store files could cut costs
dramatically, he said. Keping their file systems on Windows servers would
have cost the company $600,000 in hardware and five times that to pay for
the personnel to manage the servers.

"We know that Linux is not for everything," he said. "But
there are not many applications that require more than Linux can give
us."

Snodgrass's group proposed replacing the company's Microsoft Exchange
servers with a Linux-based solution that would have all the same
collaboration features and have a cost savings of 70 percent to 80 percent.
However, for other reasons that Snodgrass wouldn't discuss, the company's
executives decided to stick with Exchange but outsource the management of
the groupware to save money.

Not everyone agrees that Linux saves money, however. Last year, market
researcher IDC released a report, heralded by Microsoft, that indicated
that the five-year cost of ownership for four out of five applications
would be lower if Microsoft software was used. The sole Linux winner was
Web server software, according to the report.

Snodgrass said he wasn't familiar with the study, but his own data
indicated that running virtual Linux servers saves a lot of money compared
with running those same services under Windows.

"We've done our numbers, and we are a bank, so we know our
numbers," he said.

Other companies apparently have crunched the numbers and come to the same
conclusion. ...
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No wonder Ballmer is dumping his MSFT holdings, and telling the Microsoft
employees that corporations don't want Microsoft technology.

  /m

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