Trusting Open Source for Production...
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@DustinB3403 said:
has posted why / when businesses choose Open Source over closed source.
Closed/Open source is never the determining factor when choosing a solution. You have a business need and you fill that with the best solution that makes business sense. Opensource or closed source doesn't really play into it unless the goal is for customization..
Of course I won't go into that, because it's often better to make your own solution than highly customize a pre-made one.
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I think Jason is right.
That's probably the long and the short of it.Finding a solution that provides what you need. For the SMB, that generally means a complete full product - rare is the situation when and SMB is going to code anything themselves - or outsource to have it done.
Dustin, you also mentioned that SMBs can probably suffer a 4 hour outage but a large company can't? Maybe that's true, maybe it's not. Again depends on the situation.
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@Dashrender said:
Dustin, you also mentioned that SMBs can probably suffer a 4 hour outage but a large company can't? Maybe that's true, maybe it's not. Again depends on the situation.
We had a four hour outage from the DC to All South Carolina and Indiana Locations last week. It was because of a backbone failure. Four hours is a pretty quick repair.. Yes it costs us hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue. But to have the infrastructure to prevent that kind of very rare outage all the time would cost us far more. It's a solely a business decision, not an IT one.
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@Dashrender said:
Finding a solution that provides what you need. For the SMB, that generally means a complete full product - rare is the situation when and SMB is going to code anything themselves - or outsource to have it done.
Outsourcing Application development is probably one of the worse decisions you can make. You get locked into something that will never be updated and no one can really support. If you don't have a in house development team custom applications are not the way to go.
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@DustinB3403 said:
Thank you for the responses, but still no one besides maybe @scottalanmiller has posted why / when businesses choose Open Source over closed source.
Lets take for example Xen Orchestra, I just yesterday compiled the system in my home lab (running on my Xen Server Hypervisor as a VM)
Now I doubt many people would be willing to implement and use Xen Orchestra in a business environment because well, there is no paid support. It's the community edition.
But why not, the software is simply configured by you, supported by you, and at a substantial saving to you. Why is a solution as heavily adored by many professionals looked down upon because it's the "community edition"?
First of all, understand that my situation is very different from most. The people I work for own 5 different companies, and I'm the lone IT person for all of them. Less than 20 total people throughout those 5 companies (putting the small in small business!) Thinking of it as more of a one man MSP would be about right.
Only one of those companies would actually have the cash flow to make paid support an option. Also, when the only servers in the places are used boxes from Stallard Technologies (www.stikc.com), the support and/or licensing for a server OS starts at ~2x what the box its self cost. Add to the mix that I had been an IRIX admin previously, and open source is just the way to go.
So far the only thing that could go wrong from the user side is the internet going down. Which did happen this week due to a hard drive failure and the raid array being in read-only mode on the host while it rebuilt. Yes, the internet routing is being handled by an open source software distribution. The CentOS gives me not only a router, but also IPS, IDS, blind proxy, real-time virus scans, and VPN. Sure a paid solution will offer all those features, but at what price? Especially when I can get it installed and configured in less than an hour.
Within the next year I'll have them setup on a proper domain and file server as well, also all open source. Making user files available for them whatever computer they happen to be in front of at any given point is kinda a big deal. All done with different open source options.
I'll grant you that most admins have been trained in the Microsoft way of doing things rather that the UNIX/IRIX/Linux way. So, business wise, paying for Microsoft Server licensing, rather than complete retaining, makes a lot more sense in those cases.
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Well think about it like this.
As one option, you have the "we ourselves will support it" on the other hand you have "Microsoft (or whoever) will support it".
When does having Microsoft there become more of a cost or burden compared to using an open source alternative.
Back to Xen Orchestra, would anyone here use Xen Orchestra and not specifically XOA (the paid option in a Production system) if the software works just as well. All you'd be losing is the "paid support" aspect which you might never use.
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@DustinB3403 said:
Back to Xen Orchestra, would anyone here use Xen Orchestra and not specifically XOA (the paid option in a Production system) if the software works just as well. All you'd be losing is the "paid support" aspect which you might never use.
Well, considering I spun up a fresh Debian install in VB last night and got the latest test build of Xen Orchestra running, I don't see why not. I've even got it (slowly) uploading to my Google Drive account as an ova so others can easily use it if they'd like. It really should be an option for an all Linux shop.
Edit: complete thoughts help
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@DustinB3403 said:
Well think about it like this.
As one option, you have the "we ourselves will support it" on the other hand you have "Microsoft (or whoever) will support it".
When does having Microsoft there become more of a cost or burden compared to using an open source alternative.
Back to Xen Orchestra, would anyone here use Xen Orchestra and not specifically XOA (the paid option in a Production system) if the software works just as well. All you'd be losing is the "paid support" aspect which you might never use.
I guess that depends - how much does XOA cost? how much is that support? What does the support get you?
Then onto the business side - how expensive is downtime? -
@Dashrender If downtime is expensive (which it is for anyone) and support is still offered (at the SMB size) within the 4 hour window generally, why wouldn't every business or IT professional do everything they could to learn the systems they have an become an expert on them.
That would make support non-existent. Unless for some reason you died or were otherwise unable to fix the problem.
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@BRRABill said:
@Jason said:
You are generally less protected by windows.. Heck if windows has an issue it's closed source so even if you knew how to fix it you couldn't in many cases.
I guess my "argument" is that I trust MS more than a community to fix issues.
The whole community thing is what I need to come to grips with, I think.
I might have missed things already said as I'm starting from the top so ignore if redundant...
But you are connecting "open source" to "community." Don't make that leap. Microsoft makes open source software too. When you have open source you get Microsoft AND the community AND yourself to fix it. You never get less, you get more. We are talking about open source versus closed source, not about business versus community. You are connecting concepts that do not have a direct connection.
You could just as easily say that you trust Red Hat to fix Linux but don't trust the Spiceworks community to fix Windows. Why do you associate one with a business providing support and one without? Your mental connection there is arbitrary.
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@Dashrender said:
@scottalanmiller said:
Long term support response issues are typically associated with the "bundled" support that SMBs try to get. SMBs don't like to pay for support, they like to buy software and feel like support is free. Enterprises typically get their software for free and pay for the support. When you pay for support you get a completely different experience because the vendor has to provide good support or you don't pay. But in the SMB the goal is to convince you to stop calling support because every call costs them money. They want you to stop calling and stop depending on them. The way that different organizations buy support changes how the interaction between them and the vendor works.
Interesting.
Would support be more expensive for SMB if the vendors gave the product away and only charged for support? Of course SMBs probably would rarely be calling upon the vendor to make kernel fixes, etc, they would be asking for break fix support.
But perhaps that's just not really possible, because as you said, SMBs are using this support more for augmented IT because the SMB doesn't know the product and are simply relying on the vendor to support the product (I'll admit I've done that with Cisco before - have them write the config for me when I needed a change).
SMBs can and once in a while do buy support like this today. In a way, this is what happens when you engage an MSP instead of buying software and hoping that the vendor does your portion of the work for you.
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@DustinB3403 said:
Thank you for the responses, but still no one besides maybe @scottalanmiller has posted why / when businesses choose Open Source over closed source.
Lets take for example Xen Orchestra, I just yesterday compiled the system in my home lab (running on my Xen Server Hypervisor as a VM)
Now I doubt many people would be willing to implement and use Xen Orchestra in a business environment because well, there is no paid support. It's the community edition.
But why not, the software is simply configured by you, supported by you, and at a substantial saving to you. Why is a solution as heavily adored by many professionals looked down upon because it's the "community edition"?
Tons of businesses do that. Tons want support. But those that do would hit up Olivier and pay for support. Trust me, even if there is no official support contract, if you call the developers as a Fortune 500, you can make a deal for special, personal support. If Bank of America called Olivier and said they wanted to pay six figures a year for "instant" support on XO, they'd get it.
Even ML is large enough that we are talking about getting NodeBB involved directly through custom support channels rather than through their normal ones because we need a type and level of service that isn't common enough to have on a rate sheet. The smaller the vendor, the easier it is to work these things out.
But that being said, even thought the bulk of the Fortune 500 runs RHEL and pays for support, many also choose CentOS because they find that they don't need support and the cost savings outweighs the risks. I was at the world's largest bank for eight years and never once did we need Red Hat to help us. It was great knowing that they were there "just in case" and they often weighed in to back up our ideas or opinions, but we never needed them. Good IT practices with testing, backups, etc. mean that only rarely do you have a situation where a vendor would be "needed" and that is almost exclusively with patches.
If you think about what a situation looks like where you suddenly need the vendor involved chances are you had other IT issues leading up to that. I've been in IT for 26 years and I've never once needed to go to the vendors for support of normal IT products. Not once. I didn't even learn that this was a "thing" until I started participating in online communities and realized that lots of companies use their vendors for things that I had always associated with the internal IT department.
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@Jason said:
@DustinB3403 said:
has posted why / when businesses choose Open Source over closed source.
Closed/Open source is never the determining factor when choosing a solution. You have a business need and you fill that with the best solution that makes business sense. Opensource or closed source doesn't really play into it unless the goal is for customization..
Of course I won't go into that, because it's often better to make your own solution than highly customize a pre-made one.
This is very important to understand, what Jason points out here. Except in rare cases where you need to customize the code, actively plan on participating in the code, need to audit the code or similar you should not be considering the source licensing. This is one of those bizarre things that mostly only, again, happens in the SMB. Enterprises don't sit around wondering if the source code is open or not, it's not very important.
A few core principals that I think people generally miss:
- Open is always better for the customer than closed, all other factors equal. Period. No ifs ands or buts.
- Except in the cases mentioned, source licensing is a mostly trivial factor.
That pretty much sums it up. Open is always better than closed, but source licensing is rarely important enough to even consider.
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@Dashrender said:
Dustin, you also mentioned that SMBs can probably suffer a 4 hour outage but a large company can't? Maybe that's true, maybe it's not. Again depends on the situation.
SMBs are more likely to be able to handle a large outage, but even enterprises do that regularly and it is rarely a huge deal. It's a deal, but it is factored into their thinking. They understand risks, typically, and plan for them rather than assuming it won't happen and freaking out when it does. Enterprises tend to be more driven by logic and path and less by emotion and fear.
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@Jason said:
@Dashrender said:
Dustin, you also mentioned that SMBs can probably suffer a 4 hour outage but a large company can't? Maybe that's true, maybe it's not. Again depends on the situation.
We had a four hour outage from the DC to All South Carolina and Indiana Locations last week. It was because of a backbone failure. Four hours is a pretty quick repair.. Yes it costs us hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost revenue. But to have the infrastructure to prevent that kind of very rare outage all the time would cost us far more. It's a solely a business decision, not an IT one.
This^^^
IT too often things that "outages can't happen" and we must prevent them "at any cost." This is never true. Outages have a dollar value and preventing them has a dollar cost. The prevention must be cheaper than the outage or it is insanity.
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@DustinB3403 said:
Well think about it like this.
As one option, you have the "we ourselves will support it" on the other hand you have "Microsoft (or whoever) will support it".
But those aren't the options. It's not one versus the other. It's less versus more. With closed source you have:
- The Vendor
- Vendor Partners
- Community with limited support options (advice but not fixes)
With open source you have:
- The Vendor
- Vendor Partners
- Third party support companies
- Community with unlimited support options
- The ability to fix it yourself.
See... one is always more. It's not A vs. B. It is A vs A+B. Open source takes nothing away from the customer, it only gives.
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@Dashrender said:
I guess that depends - how much does XOA cost? how much is that support? What does the support get you?
Then onto the business side - how expensive is downtime?And does paid support for your secondary Xen interface prevent production downtime? If so, how? Under what condition would XO being down cause your company to lose money? Would anyone know except for the IT team?
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@DustinB3403 said:
@Dashrender If downtime is expensive (which it is for anyone) and support is still offered (at the SMB size) within the 4 hour window generally, why wouldn't every business or IT professional do everything they could to learn the systems they have an become an expert on them.
That would make support non-existent. Unless for some reason you died or were otherwise unable to fix the problem.
^^^ This
It's called having an IT department. Until I read Spiceworks, I never knew any company did anything differently. I truly mean that. Outside of special cases where very focused experts were brought in, every company I had ever witnessed for decades had done exactly this. Their IT handled the IT, they weren't brokers to outside IT people from vendors.
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@scottalanmiller said:
I might have missed things already said as I'm starting from the top so ignore if redundant...
But you are connecting "open source" to "community." Don't make that leap. Microsoft makes open source software too. When you have open source you get Microsoft AND the community AND yourself to fix it. You never get less, you get more. We are talking about open source versus closed source, not about business versus community. You are connecting concepts that do not have a direct connection.
You could just as easily say that you trust Red Hat to fix Linux but don't trust the Spiceworks community to fix Windows. Why do you associate one with a business providing support and one without? Your mental connection there is arbitrary.
While the OP might have been talking about the concept of Open Source, I am comparing equal products items in my head.
Windows to Linux
Office to LibreOffice -
@BRRABill Compare Open Source vs Open Source Paid Support
RedHat vs CentOS or Xen vs Citrix Support for Xen
That was / is my intention.
