Well, we are deep in a financial down-turn and no one is immune. As I look back over the last decade and view all the twists and turns in my I.T. shop with different technologies and software…I have no regrets about embracing open source today.
When I first started at my present job we used DOS 6.1, Windows 3.11, Novell 4.11, Lotus, Oracle 7.34 and SPX/IPX protocol. For those of you who know what I just said…quit laughing. The rest of you are lucky to have missed all this stuff. Although, I do still like Oracle for a database. I just would have NEVER ran it on Novell with SPX/IPX packets bouncing aimlessly around my hub based network. But, that was what I inherited.
Mid-way, we transitioned to Windows NT 4.0 and 2000, TCP/IP, Office 97, Switches, Exchange Server, Oracle on Solaris and started dabbling in Apache web servers, not seriously though. This was an improvement, in that, I did not need to restart my Novell Oracle server everyday…but the Exchange Server took it’s place on a weekly basis. Praying that the datastore was not corrupted each time. Oh yea, and the innumerable pockets of corporate data created by Access97 was always fun, too.
Today, our entire core is either Linux or Unix. We run our email on load balanced linux servers running Egroupware. Oracle is still on Solaris SPARC machines. Our network file systems, domain controllers, authentication services, DNS, DHCP and all other related network service are run on Linux. Our only Windows machines are our Citrix farm and the few desktops we have left. This may seem silly, but we have server birthday parties based on the years they’ve been up since a cold or soft reboot. So far the record is 900+ days.
OK, so what does this all have to do with the financial down turn…try a nearly two-thirds cost ownership reduction over the same time period…enough said.