Leading analysts caution that the initial price of the operating system is only a small part – often less than ten percent (10%) – of the total cost of ownership (TCO) for an entire solution. Staff recruitment, training, and consulting services need to be considered as well. To get an accurate picture of what TCO can be realized over a 5 year period, administration, operations, application development, support, and managing software updates, should be taken into account.
IDC Study on Linux and Windows Server Total Cost of Ownership
It’s been difficult to find public comparative data on using Linux versus Windows in a real IT environment. Studies that have been made are often based on varying assumptions about the hardware configurations and the requirements to install, configure, deploy, and manage the IT infrastructure. Users who enthusiastically report great Linux savings typically ignore important ongoing costs that are incurred by less functional operating system such as Linux or the higher support overhead associated with it.
To get a better comparison, Microsoft asked respected market research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) to interview customers and calculate the real world costs of using Linux and Windows in the enterprise over a five year period. The study compared the TCO for five typical workloads: Web serving, security, file sharing, print serving, and network infrastructure. More than 100 businesses were surveyed. Among the cost considerations were hardware and software deployment, downtime, number of full-time employees required to maintain servers with each operating system, and staff training costs.
Overall, Windows had a lower TCO on 4 out of 5 workloads. The table below compares the overall TCO by workload, normalized per 100 employees, between the Windows 2000 Server environment and Linux.
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