Linux 40 percent cheaper than Windows, exclaims IBM

Linux's total cost of operation (TCO) is typically 40 percent lower than Windows, according to an IBM-sponsored report from the Robert Frances Group (RFG), publicized by IBM this week.

The report comes after two years of Microsoft-sponsored research heralding the benefits of Windows over Linux, although IBM denied it is a direct response.

Ironically, the study appears just as Unilever has revealed it is scaling back ambitious Linux plans announced two years ago. Unilever argues that Linux's cost benefits have declined so far that the project is no longer worth it.

The Robert Frances study will be welcomed by companies looking for solid data on Linux cost benefits, even if it is sponsored by a company that's sunk more than $1 billion into promoting the open-source operating system. The relatively few independent studies of Linux's TCO have come to similar conclusions to the Robert Frances study. For example, last year an Australian IT services firm concluded that Linux installations could be up to 36 percent cheaper to install and run over a period of three years than comparable Windows systems, though support and hardware costs could lower the savings to as little as 19 percent.

The Robert Frances study simplifies things by examining a single application layer found in most enterprises -- application servers -- and compares installations on Linux using x86 hardware, Windows on x86 and Solaris on Sparc. (Researchers attempted to gather data on Solaris on Opteron, but this combination is relatively new and wasn't encountered in the course of the study.)

The overall finding was that Linux was 40 percent less expensive than a comparable Windows system and 54 percent less than Solaris, based on a three-year period of ownership for a system supporting 100,000 operations per second on the SPECjbb benchmark. The research was based on in-depth interviews with IT executives from more than 20 medium and large enterprises -- all with more than 250 employees -- in industries such as education, entertainment, finance, government and retail.

Based on this finding, the study recommends executives consider Linux for most high-transaction environments. While admitting that Linux's cost savings have declined over the past few years, Robert Frances argues Linux will remain cheap enough relative to other systems to make any investment worthwhile.

The group also noted that Linux delivered enough benefits outside of TCO to justify investment. "Executives... can also identify business benefits that will in most cases outweigh the cost savings alone of moving to Linux for specific solutions," the report said. Those benefits include Linux's flexible licensing model, the wide range of supported hardware platforms, a choice of support providers and the transferability of Unix administrator skills to Linux.

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