The sun is shining on Linux in the Florida peninsula of Pinellas County. At a time when Microsoft Windows dominates the corporate desktop, the City of Largo has chosen Linux.
The city runs server-based Linux applications on thin-client hardware to save money, minimize support headaches, and ease IT budgeting.
David Richards, systems administrator in Largo, realized years ago that PCs required a lot of management support and were an expensive computing proposition. "It didn't measure up to fiscal responsibility in government," he says. So when the time came to retire the green screen terminals that served the city's 1,000 employees, the city decided that rather than deploy a network of Windows PCs, a better evolutionary step would be to set up a graphical environment via thin clients.
Today, 900 city employees have user accounts on Largo's network of 400 Explora 451 thin clients from Network Computing Devices Inc. On the server side, two Compaq servers--a 933MHz dual-processor ML370 and a 1GHz dual-processor ML350--run Red Hat Linux 7.2 and support about 220 concurrent users.
Richards estimates that using Linux saves the city at least $1 million a year in hardware, software licensing, maintenance, and staff costs.
For the City of Largo, running a full Linux client on a PC was never an option. "We didn't have PC hardware," he says, and the city wasn't about to make such a hefty investment. The city would have had to purchase about 400 desktop PCs, and then plan to replace those systems about every two to three years, the average PC lifecycle. Replacing one-third of them each year would have cost about $150,000 annually, says Richards.
By contrast, Richards says the city has spent very little on Linux thus far. For example, the operating system was virtually free, each Compaq server cost about $9,500, and it cost about $8,000 for the hardware to run Oracle. Maintenance costs are expected to remain flat as applications move from Unix to Linux, and perhaps drop a bit as NT applications are ported to Linux. Only two or three of the city's 10-person IT staff are needed for end-user support because there are so few calls. "With our NCD thin clients we won't look at additional desktop hardware expenses until our 2007 budget," Richards says.
