One tool to rule them all

Saturday, December 1. 2007

Posted by Joe O'Brien in Sysadmin at 14:14 | Comment (1) | Trackbacks (0)

When you need a tool you reach for one of these, right?

Why not? It has everything those other tools out there have. Isn’t this the same tool you see all mechanics using? You use one of these for opening bottles of wine, right? Got one of these handy for when you need to hang a picture? Or cut down a tree?

This seems really absurd looking at the picture and thinking about doing any of those tasks so why is it such a hard concept for some to grasp when we put it in abstract terms related to IT? I overheard a debate about what was better: using multiple “best in breed” technologies from different sources or using a single solution that does those tasks to some degree. Sure, from an IT administration perspective it’s easier to just support one broad solution. Sounds appealing.

But is that what’s really best for your users? Think about forcing your graphic designers to use Windows instead of Mac. Or making your sales people use Linux. You only want to support just one OS and the one you picked does everything the others do, right?

Use the right tool for the job at hand. You’ll find it was worth the extra trip to the hardware store.

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Hey Joe,

This is so true, yet so many people just don’t "get it".

I’m a huge Linux guy, been using it for almost 11 years now. While I work in a 99% Windows environment, I have a Linux box on my desk and that’s what *I* use for 99% of my work. If or when I need to run some Windows program, it’s only an rdesktop/tsclient click away.

I work in IT at a .edu. It would be impossible for us to try to cram a one-size-fits-all solution down everyone’s throat. Yes, that would be a helluva lot easier to support and manage, but we wouldn’t be nearly as efficient.

Our email/file/etc. servers run Windows, and for good reason—they integrate into the environment so much easier. When you look at our web environment, however, you’ll find it’s all running on Linux (Apache/Perl/PHP/MySQL/PgSQL/etc.). Running that on Linux frees us to devote more of our time to the Windows side of things, because the Linux side "just works".

Eventually these people will learn. =)

#1 Jeremy L. Gaddis (Homepage) on 2007-12-06 00:57 (Reply)

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