How to properly bring Linux into corporation?

[iSeriesCodePoet]

I was wondering how others introduced the aspect of bringing in Linux to the picture for slowly replacing servers in a NT, Novell, and AS400 network. With all of the licenses and such. Do you just introduce the option when it is time to buy a new server?

Just a curious thought... Mike Wills
AS400 Programmer

 

[SteveTheGeek]

How you go about it depends largely upon the size of your organization, and who can authorize such things. I can't imagine casually migrating to new server OSes. We looked at Linux, and found that Win2k was going to continue to be a better fit for our company. If you really want to get Linux in your organization, #1 make sure you've got the Linux expertise on-hand (running your own Linux workstation and a couple testbed Linux servers for six months would be a good start), #2 write up a proposal on which servers you'd migrate to Linux, what functions/services would be impacted, and what the cost savings would be. Do NOT make such a proposal without having planned things out thoroughly, because if you look like you haven't thought everything through, you might not get another opportunity.

And of course, the above was just my two cents.
-Steve

 

[Xenobia]

Steve's advice is absolutely sound - running a testbed/evaluation system is an absolute must as the expectation will be that any transition must appear seamless to the end user.

In fact your best case scenario if given the go ahead is if you're users don't even realise you've made the change over apart from reporting better performance/stability.

The other opportune time to introduce Linux is when implementing a new system, especially if its own that will sit in development/evaluation for while before going live. Even then your proposal, and especially any cost/benefit analysis will be critical to getting final approval.

You could pitch running a parallel evaluation is such situations, running 2 testbeds with different platforms side by side to evaluate one against the other.

But in circumstamces, you should expect to have to make a solid business case to management.