Understanding Linux Migrations: How easy is it to change distributions?
Users sometimes have the perception that using Linux gives complete flexibility to change distributions. However, a study by 'The Analyst Report' found that migrating servers to a new Linux distribution is not necessarily easy, inexpensive, or predictable.
According to 'The Analyst Report' Migrating to a new distribution can be "costly and labour intensive. Costs cannot be easily predicted by the number of migrated servers nor the workloads on the migrated servers, and these costs are not easily mitigated by hiring experienced IT staff."
Specifically, Keystone Strategy analysed the following questions:
- Across a variety of workloads and organisation sizes, are there significant costs to migrate between Linux distributions?
Migrations are often costly and almost 40% of migrations involved significant costs (i.e. over 20% of the original installation cost) - What cost categories drive migration costs?
Labour drives migration costs, with labour making up two thirds of costs. Half the migrations required more labour than the original installation of migrated servers - What factors influence whether migration to a new Linux distribution will be relatively expensive or inexpensive?
Migration costs are hard to predict, no statistically significant relationships were found between the migration cost or labour effort and number of servers, number or workloads, combination of workloads, use of custom applications, or years of staff experience - Can hiring experienced Linux administrators allow organisations to mitigate migration costs?
The lack of a statistically significant relationship between migration costs and years of staff experience indicates staff experience is not a good predictor and has a limited effect on mitigating migration costs.
Mercer Management Consulting, also carried out a study on migrating servers to drive lower TCO and increase ROI, a summary of
Mercer Management Consulting findings can be found here.
For more information on migrating your server to a Windows server call on 0800 458 4545 or request more information online.
