Business case for switching to Linux

[John Van Ostrand]

On Mon, 2006-04-10 at 18:52 -0700, Christopher Browne wrote:
> On 4/10/06, John Van Ostrand <john-Da48MpWaEp0CzWx7n4ubxQ at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> > It really depends on the system and the administrator. A re-install of a
> > complex system that would take days to reconfigure may be more of a
> > business hit than the hour to fix it.
> 
> The only reason for it to be "acceptable" to get stuck with this is if
> you have a totally unmaintainable system that is actually impossible
> to reinstall.

Not impossible, just time consuming.

> If we had such a problem with a database server, you can bet it'll be
> *toast*, down to reimaging from scratch.  It's not that hard.

But if an image doesn't exist?

> And what you really want with your systems is the ability to rebuild
> from scratch, *easily*.  See <http://www.infrastructures.org/>; the
> folks in that organization find it unacceptable if they can't rebuild
> a server *from scratch* in 20 minutes.

I can see how, in a very locked down environment, that one could recover
from an image in 20 minutes but a re-install would take far longer than
that.

It would be nice if all servers could be restored in 20 minutes. In most
cases it's just not possible. Even then, a data restore could take hours
beyond the imaging time. I've dealt with customers that don't have a
backup or an image. To re-install would take a full-backup, re-install,
re-configure, restore, then the ensuing issues. On simple servers with
lots of data this can take many hours. On complex servers with previous
admins long gone, and poor documentation its a days-long event.

> If anything, Linux should be easier than the "traditional Unixes" to
> do this with.



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