Mindbridge switches to Linux, saves "bunches of money"
Posted by: Anonymous
[ip: 71.35.239.50]
on September 09, 2007 02:39 AM
We're gradually switching our company's infrastructure over to Linux. When I took over as manager of Internet related stuff in January they were an 100% Windows shop. I made some attempt to do something useful using their existing Windows/IIS servers and quickly decided to go with a LAMP system I typically used. We set up a dual quad-core Xeon server running Linux and VMWare and moved the majority of our existing servers into virtual machines and setup several new servers as virtual machines also. With Linux and VMWare it is much more affordable to isolate specific services into their own virtual machines which makes development and maintainance easier and makes it easier to keep things secure and reliable. We no longer have a growing stack of server boxes to manage. We've gradually been replacing Windows servers with Linux (and sometimes BSD) servers because they are so much cheaper, use less resources, and are more flexible. A webserver that was using 2GB of RAM under Windows serves the same websites in 512MB of RAM under Linux and is more flexible. We switched Windows file servers to FreeNAS and it went from a couple gigs of RAM to using 128MB of RAM and it lets us access files using CIFS or SSH (SCP/SFTP) which the old server didn't.
So far we're down to two servers still running Windows. The one is used mostly for the security system and the other has our enterprise management software (inventory etc) on it. Both use proprietary software which makes switching them difficult. We do plan to upgrade the enterprise system to AIX in the near future though. We expect that to be a lot faster and easier to manage than the clunky Windows system.
The desktop is an area I'll be looking at next. I've been working on replacing some of the proprietary desktop apps we use, again part of our enterprise systems, with custom written web-apps that will allow us to use fewer licenses and have better usability. Once we no longer use those apps it'll make a lot of sense to switch those desktops to Linux. Doing so will make our support costs go down as there will be far less issues with security and stupid mistakes by users.
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Mindbridge switches to Linux, saves "bunches of money"
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 71.35.239.50] on September 09, 2007 02:39 AMSo far we're down to two servers still running Windows. The one is used mostly for the security system and the other has our enterprise management software (inventory etc) on it. Both use proprietary software which makes switching them difficult. We do plan to upgrade the enterprise system to AIX in the near future though. We expect that to be a lot faster and easier to manage than the clunky Windows system.
The desktop is an area I'll be looking at next. I've been working on replacing some of the proprietary desktop apps we use, again part of our enterprise systems, with custom written web-apps that will allow us to use fewer licenses and have better usability. Once we no longer use those apps it'll make a lot of sense to switch those desktops to Linux. Doing so will make our support costs go down as there will be far less issues with security and stupid mistakes by users.
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