Open Source, Cutting the Cost of a Gallon of Milk

As consumers, we routinely go to the grocery store in search of the goods we need for our daily lives, each of which is conveniently labelled with a nice little yellow tag indicating the price we'll pay at the cash register. Have you ever stopped to think about how that price is derived? Certainly there are the broader economic forces of supply and demand at work, but viewed through a different lens, the price of a gallon of milk to the consumer is the sum total of many parts of the equation: the farmer, the pasteurizer, the bottler, the delivery truck, and finally the store itself. If any one of those components is reduced, the store lowers the end price. We as consumers aren't privy to why the price went down, nor do we particularly care, but it certainly does make us feel better when the final total that rings up on the cash register is a bit lower.

So how does this relate to the IT world? Consider the gallon of milk to be one of the business applications that your enterprise relies on, and the grocery store customer to be one of your business users. Using this analogy, all of those piece parts (the farmer, the delivery truck, etc) become the various tiers of our IT infrastructure. If we view the world from an application centric point of view, all of those datacenters, servers/storage/networking components, virtualization layers, operating systems, and platform components all become embedded costs into delivering what the user really wants, which is the application to do their job. This, in my mind, is the new reality of the fiscally constrained world, for better or worse, all of the great IT capability required to deliver those applications out to the users is perceived to be more of a cost than a capability. The customer just wants their milk cold, properly handled, and at the best price.

So how can open source help us cut the cost of a gallon of milk? In many environments, while the aforementioned stack normally contains a wealth of proprietary components, IT organizations have traditionally done fairly well in ensuring the adherence to standards. Those standards can often allow us to target the virtualization, operating systems, and platform components for replacement with open source solutions. Why these parts? Simply because for all the breadth and diversity that's in the open source ecosystem today, those three components remain one of open source's biggest sweet spots. From KVM, to RHEL, to JBoss, and others, these are best of breed components available at a mere fraction of the cost of the proprietary components they replace. If we're smart and deliberate about the application of these open source components, we as IT professionals can use these powerful tools to reduce the embedded costs required to deliver applications out to our users without sacrificing any of traditional IT mantras (security, stability, availability, maintainability, etc).

In summary, the current economic climate has certainly reduced budgets and buying power. However, by using open source to cut the embedded costs of application delivery, we can make things quite a bit cheaper for our customer at the checkout counter, ensuring that they always leave our store feeling good about that gallon of milk.

-Quint Van Deman