[plug] [link] Largo, later: loving it!

[Leon Brooks]

    http://newsforge.com/newsforge/02/12/04/2346215.shtml?tid=19

    True to Largo's "City of Progress" motto, these guys have not been
    standing still. Now they're talking about Linux-based terminals in
    all the city's police cars. [...]

    This time we're also chatting with their boss, IT Manager/CIO
    Harold A. Schomaker, who is more than a little proud of their
    latest ultra-cool deal: finding a whole bunch of the NCD thin
    clients they prefer -- which sell new for around $750 -- on eBay
    for prices ranging from 50 cents to $5. No, they aren't the latest
    model, but who cares? These things have no moving parts; the
    super-cheap used ones are more than adequate to run a KDE desktop
    and all the apps a typical city employee needs; and with a 10 year
    expected life it doesn't matter if they're a few years old. [...]

    Now let's talk about the most important feature of this entire
    system from a sysadmin's or IT manager's point of view: A silent
    beeper.

    We noted on our last Largo visit, and note once again, that these
    are the least harassed, least worried, calmest sysadmins we have
    ever met. They have one of the smallest and least-worked help
    desks we have ever seen -- five people who support 450+ client
    units and over 800 users, and it is all done without any fuss,
    muss or hurry. [...]

    Harold, Mike, and Dave all note that when they go to technical
    conferences and other sysadmin get-togethers, they are usually
    the only ones in the place who are not getting a steady stream
    of frantic interruptions. [...]

    We are not knocking Harold, Mike and Dave by saying they are
    not brilliant. They are smart and they care about their jobs,
    but none of what they've done is truly original or even new.
    They know this, and they keep saying it. The real strangeness
    is not that these guys have managed to build such a wonderful,
    cost-effective system, but that so few others have done the
    same thing. 

    Everything in the Largo IT ecosystem is off-the-shelf standard
    goods, from hardware to software to the wires that hook
    everything together. The innovation here comes in making
    maximum use of everything, and not necessarily in obvious ways
    -- and in coming up with solutions that are as much social
    engineering as technical, like the "cybercafe" in the Largo
    City Hall's employee break room. 

    A common complaint among employers -- especially government
    employers -- is that workers spend too much paid time surfing
    the Net for personal purposes or exchanging personal email.
    And yet, many people may only have Internet access -- or at
    least broadband access -- at work. The Largo solution is to
    put four terminals in the break room, and load them only with
    Mozilla and Evolution, and encourage workers to surf, chat,
    and play online all they want during their lunch hours and
    other breaks. 

    Many IT shops might hesitate to put in something like this;
    those that run PCs would need to supply and maintain four
    complete computers, including (no doubt) Windows, so they'd
    need to have virus software kept up to date and take care of
    all the other chores that go along with running a standalone
    computer. But none of this applies in the Largo IT scheme.
    The four thin-client units in the break room were purchased
    for $2 each on eBay and take no maintenance, and besides the
    client pieces all you have is keyboards, mice, and monitors,
    and these are not costly items. The biggest thing that makes
    this sort of niceness possible, though, big enough that it's
    worth saying over again, is no maintenance! 

    When you run a servercentric network, you only need to
    maintain and update one copy of each application you run. As
    long as your servers are sized correctly for the load you
    anticipate, plus a substantial margin for error, adding
    another few terminals is literally no work at all beyond
    physically plugging things in.

    Dave says, "About a year ago we had two gentlemen from Microsoft
    come in who spent two or three hours with us." The Microsoft
    reps asked the Largo people to be frank with them and explain
    their needs as clearly as possible, which is what happened. 

    "Mostly it was an issue of scalability," Dave says. This, not
    money, is what they told the Microsoft people their biggest
    barrier was. At any given moment, Largo's network may have over
    200 people actively logged in and working, often more, and they
    are all running from a single main server, plus several servers
    that run specific applications. Even the Microsoft people
    couldn't refute the fact that Largo's current setup uses far
    less hardware and is far easier to administer and physically
    maintain than an equivalent Windows-based system. 

    "And that," says Harold, "was Microsoft's last sales push with
    us." [...]

    This is a pragmatic IT shop, not one run by zealots. They don't
    make decisions quickly, and when they roll out something new it
    gets a careful beta test before it goes citywide. When these
    people roll out OpenOffice, with a few StarOffice licenses for
    workers who need the commercial version's better import filters,
    it is not a snap judgment, but one that has taken well over a
    year to make. [...]

    Since Largo still has proprietary software around, the city is
    still subject to BSA audits. Harold says they have been
    extra-careful to follow all license terms, to the point of
    purchasing "probably more licenses than we need." 

    Other cities in the Tampa Bay area have been fined over missing
    proprietary software licenses. Largo has not been fined, and
    Harold wants to keep it that way. [...]

    Harold A. Schomaker, IT Manager/CIO for the City of Largo, says
    Largo spends a total of 1.3% of its gross budget on IT. This
    includes hardware, software, salaries, and incidental expenses.
    He says the typical small city spends over 3% of its budget on
    IT, with some approaching 4%. "Between 3% and 4% is about
    right," he says, "with most closer to 3%." [Leon notes: this
    lines up well with the IBM-sponsored RFG-implemented study at
    http://www.ibm.com/linux/RFG-LinuxTCO-vFINAL-Jul2002.pdf ]

    This is a bit of a rant from Dave, with "amens" from his
    coworkers: He is upset with other local governments that use
    Visual Basic or ActiveX to make Intranet and Internet
    applications with which Largo people must interact, in effect
    making their supposedly "browser-accessible" shared applications
    and data libraries accessible only for Microsoft Internet
    Explorer users. And, says Dave, few of the IT people in other
    governments seem to understand Largo's resistance to Explorer. 

    "Why don't you just download Explorer? It's free!" is what Dave
    says many of his counterparts in other governments often tell
    him. He says most of them don't understand that even though
    Explorer is "free" it needs Windows licenses to run, and that
    buying those can add up in a hurry[*] -- and (although he's
    certainly too polite to say it) -- not having all those Windows
    licenses is one reason Largo spends less than half as much on IT
    as many other local governments. 

    "I see this as being like a virus," Dave grouses. 

    More formally, it is called the network effect, and Microsoft is
    one of the world's most effective wielders of it as a marketing
    weapon.

[* To say nothing of Security Hole De Jour...]

Cheers; Leon