[NCLUG] Presentation idea for the future.

[Thomas Loran]

There were some good points and some bad points I thought I would  
share.  Most of the bad points were around the politics, end user  
expectations,  and lack of customer-side project management.  I am  
massaging the real numbers but basically we put  most of the money  
upfront (higher fixed cost) into high end infrastructure and used  
commercial open source support contracts.  The costs get better with  
scale and we are currently at roughly 50% of the end goal of one  
computer for every two students.

The initial  numbers seem to  be that we deployed at 62% of the cost  
of a windows XP solution and are operating at 43% the cost,  again  
using commercial open source.  In the grand scheme of a project this  
large, the commercial open source support/licensing costs are almost  
negligible.  The labor, however is where you make it  up.    Also, you  
cannot really compare the support costs, because XP  was in an ad hoc  
firefighting mode and failing while we deployed a "successful"  
structured managed solution.  Also, we deployed thin clients not fat  
clients but we had no "office"  software costs so it is  not a true  
like-to-like comparison.  Finally, with a Windows TC solution, I do  
not think  they would have scaled anywhere near as well as our  
solution did where we got an easy 150:1 ratio TC to  server  ration.   
We piloted two other non LTSP linux-based  solutions and got 18:1 and  
60:1 ratio respectively.   As you can see there can be lots of  
subjectivity here, but overall there  is no doubt it  is less  
expensive to deploy and run a linux based solution over a Windows  
based solution.

Tom



On Oct 14, 2008, at 11:35 AM, Robert Hoffman wrote:

>
> The scale of your project sounds very impressive!  I cant bear the  
> idea of waiting a whole month to get the punchline - can you tell  
> what your per seat cost was?
>
> I've done a charter school on the cheap using linux *thick* clients,  
> and would like the info for comparison...
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Thomas Loran <tom at loran3.net>
> To: Northern Colorado Linux Users Group <nclug at nclug.org>
> Sent: Friday, October 10, 2008 12:05:35 PM
> Subject: [NCLUG] Presentation idea for  the future.
>
> Hello group,
>
> I would like to volunteer to make a presentation about a project  
> myself
> one other colleague just completed.
>
> We just got done deploying 10,000 Linux thin clients on 300 servers to
> 46,000 students in 88 schools with centralized management and
> centralized authentication using 100% open source software.  We did  
> this
>
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