Should You Move to Linux?

Computerworld - Migration will involve costs. For a migration to be viable, you must be able to justify the costs with substantial new gains. For this reason, if you have a stable environment that is meeting your business needs at minimal costs, a migration may not make any sense. Some of the more significant migration costs to consider are:

• Hardware -- Moving to Linux may involve a change of hardware platforms. Depending on the current age of your existing systems, this may or may not make sense. On the other hand, as you will discover a little later, Linux's ability to support multiple platforms can make hardware reuse an attractive proposition.
  
  
  
  
• Training -- If your current environment is predominantly based on UNIX systems, then the retraining of your administrative staff should be minimal. If, however, you are migrating from a Windows, Novell, or other environment, the retraining costs will be considerable.
  
  
  
  
• Licensing -- Depending on the applications you use and your current environment, you may need to repurchase or upgrade many of your current applications. This assumes that your business applications are available for Linux. On the plus side, since Linux itself has no licensing fees, you may be able to offset some of these costs.
  
  
  
  
• Data -- It is highly likely that your true assets are in the information you store rather than the hardware and software used to store and retrieve that information. When transitioning an existing environment, data migration can become the highest cost and highest risk element. I will cover some elements of data migration a little later.

To fully understand the impacts of migration, we need to look at the details of the key components that affect these costs.

Hardware

There are those who believe that since Linux can run on a wide range of different architectures, you should consider active deployment on any of those architectures. In an earlier chapter, I outlined a number of reasons why deploying Linux on hardware platforms other than the ones where the core development occurs can be undesirable. However, migration and hardware reuse can present a good opportunity for Linux on non-core development platforms. Assume that you have an existing hardware platform that is based on a proprietary architecture. Your end goal is to deploy Linux on industry-standard hardware. Such a move will likely not occur overnight. Therefore, you can take some effective steps to reuse your existing hardware to make that transition over a number of months, or even years.

Figure 8-1 presents a simplistic view of the steps needed to get from a pure proprietary environment to a pure open, standard environment. Obviously, the real work involved in each of these steps can be very complex. If the proprietary operating system is UNIX-based, then the transition of the applications, scripts, and other components of your software infrastructure can be minimal. Other non-UNIX operating systems such as VMS, MVS, and others could require significant rewrites before being able to run on Linux. The one difficulty with Step 1 will be commercial applications. Since most commercial software vendors will make their applications available only on industry-standard hardware architectures, getting a version for your current proprietary hardware could be difficult. For these situations, you should use the approach demonstrated here as a first step in the migration of all your internally developed applications and scripts and leave commercial applications for the final stage of migration to industry-standard hardware.