The Analyst Report tries to debunk some of the myths around switching costs between various Linux distributions. The study found that migrating servers to a new Linux distribution is not necessarily easy, inexpensive, or predictable. Migrating to a new distribution can be costly and labor intensive. Costs cannot be easily predicted by the number of migrated servers nor by the workloads on the migrated servers, and these costs are not easily mitigated by hiring experienced IT staff.
Specifically, Keystone Strategy analyzed the following questions:
- Q. Across a variety of workloads and organization sizes, are there significant costs to migrate between Linux distributions? A. Migrations are often costly, and almost 40 percent of migrations involved significant costs (that is, over 20 percent of the original installation cost).
- Q. What cost categories drive migration costs? A. Labor drives migration costs, with labor making up two-thirds of costs. Half of the migrations required more labor than the original installation of migrated servers.
- Q. What factors influence whether migration to a new Linux distribution will be relatively expensive or inexpensive? A. Migration costs are hard to predict; no statistically significant relationships were found between the migration cost or labor effort and number of servers, number of workloads, combination of workloads, use of custom applications, or years of staff experience.
- Q. Can hiring experienced Linux administrators allow organizations to mitigate migration costs? A. 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.
