Hospital dumps Microsoft Exchange for Linux-based clone

In the end, it all came down to the price

May 28, 2008 (Network World) Taking a page from the doctors at Moses Taylor Hospital, IT staffers at the facility in Scranton, Pa., last year diagnosed their messaging system and came up with an effective treatment that has turned out to be a lifesaver.

The patient in this case was an aging Microsoft Exchange 5.5 environment that couldn't support increased message loads and was going to cost a bundle to upgrade.

After conducting an evaluation of alternatives, the hospital decided not to upgrade to a newer version of Exchange. Instead, it went with a Linux-based Exchange clone that it felt could meet the needs of its 700 users without forcing them and IT to learn a whole new system.

As it turns out, it wasn't feature sets that swayed the decision. It was the price, according to Frank Fallo, manager of network systems and workflow development at Moses Taylor.

"With Exchange, I saw extremely high cost, especially the ," he said. "The Microsoft billing structure was considerably more expensive, and that is just talking about the software side. If you want to include hardware, we also needed a more robust server."

Fallo got the more powerful hardware anyway, but it is running PostPath Server, a Linux-based clone of Exchange, on top of the Linux Centos operating system.

"We have estimated that PostPath saved us 50% over the cost of Exchange," Fallo said, not counting what Microsoft Corp. would have charged for maintenance and support. (He declined to get into the project's specific dollar figures.)

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Micro$haft's sun is slowly setting.

It's a tough slog for Linux to bust through the Microsoft-centric thinking in the enterprise, but as pocketbooks get tighter, more people will be looking at Linux, *BSD and others to trim costs. You will see it in both the server rooms and on desktops.

I run a dual-boot WinXP x64/Mandriva 2008.1 x86_64 system here. The Mandriva side is faster, as it uses all the cores of the Q6600, more apps are multi-threaded and there are no virus, spyware and malware issues.

For offices and especially for home users who are doing basic stuff with no game playing or specific MS apps, Linux makes a hell of a lot more sense.

I have XP on another hard drive I could run if I wanted too, but its been 3 months since I booted it up. The new Linux OS's are better than Windows ever was, IMHO.

for being able to market such a SHITTY product for how many years now.

I'm no fan of Microsoft, but the only way Linux works is if you have a staff of people constantly rebuilding the system after the Linux kernel gets upgraded every week. That process means that you have to reinstall and test all the software, because the upgrades often screw up the existing software.

Assuming they have an IT staff, that's okay. That's what ISP's do, and that's why your Internet access costs so much. But Linux makes no sense for individuals to own, not if those individuals have a life and really want to use their computers for something.