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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 enterprise environment that when enterprise 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:
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.
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 :-).
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Society
Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers : Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy
Quotes
War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotes : Somerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose Bierce : Bernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes
Bulletin:
Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law
History:
Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds : Larry Wall : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOS : Programming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC development : Scripting Languages : Perl history : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history
Classic books:
The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-Month : How to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite
Most popular humor pages:
Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor
The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D
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Created Jan 2, 2005. Last modified: March 12, 2019
