Lower the Total Cost of Ownership with Red Hat Enterprise Linux

Published on 12 June 2018

Enterprises across the world are increasingly embracing the wave of digitization. There is a growing realization among businesses that digital technology is a powerful enabler, irrespective of the industry, geography, and size of the business. Indeed, digital technology is allowing businesses to be more productive, target customers that were previously out of their reach, innovate at a significantly faster rate, and do much more.

Evidently, the rewards of digital transformation are tremendous. But, it also comes with its own cost.

Traditionally, IT departments have been operating in Windows-centric desktop environments. In the recent years, businesses are moving towards a server-centric, web-based environment. The explosive growth of mobility has only added more momentum to this trend, as such an environment readily supports mobile-driven deployments.

As this desktop-to-server transformation is gaining momentum, the Linux OS is emerging as the enterprise operating system of the future, as it continues to chip away at the market share of Windows. The reason for this is quite simple – The total cost of ownership (TCO) of Linux based systems is vastly lower than that of any proprietary systems. Here’s why.

5 Ways Red Hat Enterprise Linux Lowers Total Cost of Ownership

1. Lower Downtime and Maintenance

Unlike most other operating systems, Linux OS can run at a stretch for years together without requiring a reboot. In addition, Linux systems require significantly less maintenance too. This dramatically brings down the downtime of the servers, which offers a trifecta of benefits.

Firstly, downtime causes business losses in terms of lost customers and dissatisfied customers. Loss of goodwill and actual revenue is particularly higher during sudden, unexpected downtimes caused by system malfunctions. Secondly, downtimes bring down the productivity of the IT department resources, who have to drop everything they are working on to fix the issues causing the downtime.

Lastly, systems that require frequent maintenance are not suited for mission-critical systems. For this reason, Linux systems rule the roost in the enterprise server markets, where uptime and reliability are of critical importance.

2. Competitive Support

Linux is an open-source operating system. In other words, it is free to use. However, there is a dizzying variety of development groups working on this open-source platform. As a result, there are hundreds of distributions (version) of Linux available from different vendors like Red Hat. When businesses purchase a particular version of Linux, it comes with enterprise support from the respective vendor. This support includes a range of professional services, including technical support and implementation support.

The presence of an entire ecosystem of vendors and Linux packages ensures that there is cutthroat competition between different vendors to offer better services at competitive prices. This is a far cry from a Windows-centric environment, where development support is available from a monopoly.

3. Infrastructure Costs

In the case of enterprise-driven operating system, the hardware options for hosting the OS can be very limited. This is especially true for UNIX systems, which require proprietary infrastructure for hosting the operating system. On the other hand, Linux distributions are compatible and work perfectly on a variety of hardware. In fact, Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is widely used on hardware of almost all of the world’s top vendors, including HP, IBM, Dell, and others. Therefore, market forces come into action and ensure that the infrastructure costs are significantly lower due to competition in the vendor market.

4. IT Talent Costs

Low maintenance, low downtime, higher availability, and absence of single point of failure – all create a superior server system that is significantly more reliable than Windows or UNIX based systems. For this reason, less IT resources are needed to run and maintain Linux based server systems. In any IT department, skilled talent is one of the biggest expenses. Implementing Linux based servers can cut down the IT staffing significantly and make it leaner and more productive.

5. Security

Windows systems have always been pummeled by an endless number of viruses, Trojans, and other malware. Businesses spend a significant amount of time, money, and precious resources on fool-proofing their Windows based systems. This often means purchasing a robust security software that adds to the overall TCO of the system.

These issues are practically non-existent on the Linux platform. Linux features a Unix-like system architecture, which is remarkably secure. It is much harder to crack, compromise, and invade Linux operating systems.

RHEL: The Future of Enterprise IT

Linux comes with low to nil upfront investment expense; it requires minimal maintenance and upkeep; its security is leaps and bounds ahead of Windows platform, which protects the business from security expenses and PR expenses in the event of security breaches. Not to mention the low IT resource requirement. What’s more, businesses can forge service level agreements with vendors like Red Hat for superior support services at competitive prices. Evidently, the total cost of ownership of enterprise Linux systems like Red Hat Enterprise Linux is only a fraction of that of enterprise Windows systems.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux is a powerful enterprise solution that comes in multiple versions, which are optimized for different environments and use cases, including physical, virtual, and cloud applications.

Find out more about this powerful solution with military-grade security by contacting AsiaPac!

Take advantage of its high cost-effectiveness to reduce your expenditure, become more competitive, and increase your trustworthiness among your customers. Visit here to make it happen today.

Tags: Cloud, Enterprise Linux, Red Hat, TCO,

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