The Hidden Costs of Heterogeneous Operating System Environments

Posted June 19th, 2008 by Jonah Paransky

Often we praise the advantages of a heterogeneous operating system environment to support multi-tier business applications and IT services. We can pick the best operating system for each component of the software infrastructure stack. We have better security, because we are using different operating systems for different components of our application. We manage costs better, because we won’t be locked in by a single vendor.

All these advantages are true. There are also hidden costs associated with this approach.

In our recent study, IT Operations Research Report: Testing Maturity Part II Applications and Operating Systems, we discovered several costs associated with heterogeneous environments. They included:

Increased Total Cost of Downtime

Heterogeneous environments show a greater total cost of unplanned downtime that organizations that used one operating system for all tiers of the stack.

Increased IT Labor Hours Due to Unplanned Downtime

Companies with multiple operating system environments devote over 60% more in IT staff time to address unplanned downtime emergencies.

Increased Cost of Changes Due to Production Problems

Companies with multiple operating systems show a greater cost of changes due to production problems compared to single operating system environments.

Greater Total Number of Changes

Companies make 26% more changes to heterogeneous operating system environments than to single operating system environments.

How Does This Impact the Data Center?

We therefore shouldn’t be surprised that so many organizations go down a single operating system path. A significant number of companies choose to standardize across individual stack tiers. A majority of companies also choose one operating system, such as Windows, for all tiers of their software infrastructure stacks as we discussed in depth in a previous blog post on Windows dominance in the data center.