The cost of administration
Microsoft has argued that the Windows administrator costs easily wash away the Linux licensing cost advantage. The standard Windows argument is that a larger pool of Microsoft-certified administrators exists, so a Windows admin should cost less than a Linux admin.

Gillen said the argument seems to make sense initially, but like other TCO arguments, it is more complicated than it appears.

As one Linux consultant noted, plenty of MCSEs are available, but that doesn't mean they're all qualified.

"If you throw a rock, you'll probably hit an MCSE in the head," said Brian Schenkenfelder, president of Kentucky-based Linux consultancy n + 1. "The problem is, how many of them are any good? There are a lot of paper tigers out there, and that's true of both sides."

Schenkenfelder argues that the typical Linux administrator can handle more than the typical Windows admin.

"What I've found is that a Linux administrator who knows what he's doing should be able to administer two to three times the amount of boxes a Windows administrator should be able to administer," he said.

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A July study, conducted by Chad Robinson, senior research analyst at tech/business researcher Robert Frances Group (RFG), supports Schenkenfelder's claims. Robinson acknowledges that experienced admins for Linux or Solaris can be more expensive in some parts of the United States but noted that many of them have been working with Unix for dozens of years.

"One of the things that Microsoft is starting to lose out on now, and I'm not sure they realize this yet, is that they still claim Windows administrators are cheaper," Robinson said. "But the flip side of the same coin is that if one of my administrators on a Windows environment can manage only 10 to 15 systems at a time, but my Solaris admin or my NetBSD or my Linux admin can manage 1,000 servers at a time, I need fewer admins. Sure, the salary's more expensive, but I get more life out of them."

Labor costs significantly lower
RFG's study, "Total Cost of Ownership for Linux Web Servers in the Enterprise," compares the TCO of Linux to Solaris and Windows. Robinson compared the cost of "processing units"--the number of servers that would be required to process 100,000 hits per day, and tracked the costs over three years. Linux supporter IBM commissioned the RFG research for the study paper.

Robinson compared Red Hat Linux 7.3 running Apache to Solaris running Apache, and to Windows running IIS. The comparison was all on x86 architecture, using a relatively small sample of 14 companies running mission-critical Web servers. The study found that Windows needed an average of 7.6 servers for a processing unit, Linux needed 7.4, and Solaris needed 2.2.

The software purchase costs per processing unit varied greatly. Linux had a one-time software purchase cost of $400, with most surveyed companies buying a few copies to test different distributions of Linux and then using the free download version on most servers. Solaris had a one-time cost of $27,500 per processing unit, and Windows' up-front cost was $5,320, with a total licensing cost of $7,980 over three years.

Hardware and maintenance costs were nearly the same for Windows and Linux; Solaris cost about 10 times more. In the area where Microsoft expects to pull ahead--server admin costs--the results are what Microsoft would expect, according to Robinson.

In the survey, Linux admin salaries were slightly higher than Windows admins, with Linux at $71,400 per admin, and Windows at $68,500 per admin. But Linux admins took care of an average of 44 servers and Windows admins an average of 10. So the salary per processing unit was Linux, $12,010, and Windows, $52,060.

"And finding Linux experience is not difficult anymore," Robinson noted. "Most of the customers told us that their Solaris admins basically picked it up and worked with it within a couple of weeks."
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