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Red Hat Gets Into The Clustering Biz
Bryan Mattern writes: "An adapted version of Red Hat 6.2 centered around Linux Virtual Server/cold failover is now available. The price is $1995, but includes a year of support for a node." This is also known as Red Hat High Availability Server 1.0.
10:35pm cruching away on E3000. I hear a slight "pop" come from the SENA array. Watch in mild fascination/horror as the database drifts away from the front end like an un-hawsered boat from the pier.
10:36pm Panic. Check cables/power. Panic more.
10:38pm init 6 the whole thing. Call the end users (only 2... it's night shift). Act calm.
10:43pm system up. No data.
10:49pm call Sun (finding the card with the service number takes 5 min). Tell them my theory: "it's the gbic card". Sun's response: "we'll be the judge of that."
11:21pm Sun guy comes through the door. He's actually running...
11:58pm Sun guy stops working. Computer starts working. It's not the gbic cards, but he throws in a pair of new ones "just 'coz".
1:00pm I come in to work the next day because my ass is not fired.
The situation as it would be with that "free" rig
note, this is an untrue story...
10:35pm slight pop. no data. some screaming.
10:36pm assume it's the scsi card. remove casing. use compressed air to clear smoke away..
10:38pm scan room for compatible card to replace with. Find two ISA's used to prop up a short leg on a desk and Safeway bag full of SIMMs in the coat closet. screaming throughout.
10:41pm call Harold. He has lots of stuff. Mom answers and takes message. Find out later she relays the words "networth is down: need scooby cart".
10:51pm Debate "calling the boss man".
10:57pm call the boss man. "why don't you use the ones under the desk leg?" inform him their ISA. screaming from both parties throughout.
11:16pm have abandoned post. At "java bytes" internet cafe on 12th St. Offer pimply-faced teen large sum of cash for card from beaten Gateway in corner.
11:32 $200 poorer. case open. card in.
11:33pm it's the bus.
11:36pm surfing dice.com.
The bottom line is, if you think you're smart enough that you don't need that expensive contract you're too dumb to admin a network.
flame at will.
2 1337 4 u!
I believe the GPL makes source availability compulsory, not binaries. As long as the source for all GPL-ed stuff is available in some form, that ok. They aren't (AFAIK) required to provide a fully working binary installation set for you to download. Yes, its a shame but I think its legal..
I have seen a lot of posts on here about how it's free software and shouldn't be charged for. The GPL never says this. Instead it says you can charge whatever you want for it, however if you distribute a binary you have to make the source available for no more cost then that of the media to distribute and your time (basically.)
If I put together a distribution I can charge anything for it, say $100,000, but what the GPL protects is anybody from saying here is a bunch of binaries, if you want the code it is $100,000.
Just thought it should be mentioned.
This product is for people that can't, don't want to, or would rather spend their time doing business than recompiling their kernels.
$2000 for a support contract is nothing to a business betting the farm on a high-availability server. This product -- and, more importantly, this service RedHat is offering -- is for them.
Stop complaining about the price. As far as support contracts go, I can tell you this is pretty damned cheap.
- A.P.
--
"One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
Actually, they are under no GPL obligation to make their software available on the net at all. The GPL only says that they have to make the source available anyone who gets the binaries, and that anyone who gets the source and binaries is free to redistribute them. IOW, you're free to buy the full price distribution and make all of the GPLed software available for free download, but you have no right to demand they make it available for free download.
FWIW, this is exactly what the Free Software Foundation advocates. To quote (from Selling Free Software on the FSF web site.):
(Emphasis is theirs.) IOW, the people who wrote the GPL don't just accept the idea of selling GPLed software for what the market will bear, they actually advocate it. Of course the fact that anyone who can get a copy of GPL software is free to redistribute it inherently limits the price anyone can charge, but that's for the market to decide.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Count me one of those "stupid" people.
As a pointy-haired manager, I have to allocate resources as best I can. The most expensive resource I have to manage is labor, not machines or software. Worse, labor is not a situation where I can get all the labor I want at a given price.
I have a support staff of about 25 people, most of which are involved in end-user support. I have four full-time systems people with two vacancies I've been trying to fill for several months. To fill the gap, we had to hire an on site contractor from a consulting firm for $42/hour (dirt cheap actually) to do some of the chump work for the systems people so they could do more high-end stuff.
Now, with that in mind, and with the fact that we have several projects that are behind in, including purchase and deployment of a new SAN, roll out of Windows 2000, AutoCAD 2000, etc, etc, let me think.
If I need to deploy a Linux cluster, do I blow two grand to save time? Remember, two grand is not much more than a week of tech time on staff. Tech time that I can't afford to give up. So, $2K is really nothing.
Now, let me play the other end. To attract and keep the best talent, I have to keep them involved in what interests them. In this case, I'd ask my systems people if they want to do this on their own or to go the quick route. If they want to get down and dirty configuring it themselves, I'd actually prefer it, because that's the best way to truly understand a product. So in that case, something else has to give elsewhere, so I have to find out how to cover that.
(This is why I have the outside contractor help doing low-end stuff. If I hired an outside firm to do our higher-end stuff and stuck my loyal employees on mundane every-day shit, they'd all quit...)
There are so many variables to consider when making decisions on how to best manage resources. I certainly appreciate that Red Hat gives pointy-haired (actually, my hair is 3/4 down my back!) bosses like me choices like this, and they get to make money at it too!
Capitalism is the best!: )
I come from a Digital UNIX background [*], and I've been fortunate enough to use DEC's TruCluster product. True, it does require "better" hardware, and more support dollars - but you're not about to set up a production failover environment in your bedroom to "play" with it either.
Linux HA is still missing some of the major features of commercial clustering packages. These can be (and are, for me) showstoppers to using Linux in an HA environment.
The most notable, in my mind, is:
Shared disk. This doesn't mean shared filesystem (although TruCluster v5 is apparently approaching this). This means that all cluster nodes have a scsi (or fibre channel) controller on a shared bus. This bus is used to access the filesystems, but also for a non-network based inter-node communication method. When I see a TruCluster node boot, along with all the disks, I see "processor at id 2", "processor at id 3", corresponding to other nodes. In this manner, nodes know each other are up, even if the network "blips".
...and to a lesser extent (ie: I run without this now)
Shared System.TruCluster v5 introduces to the UNIX world what VMS has had for over a decade - the shared system disk. Each system uses the same system disk. I don't mean an identical copy, I mean the *same* disk. (Where disk can be, of course [and should be], a hardware mirror/RAID set). Node-dependent data is kept separate by maintaing private node config directories, which are referenced using "context dependant symlinks". CDSL's are essentially symlinks with variables in them.
..anyways, I've said enough. If you're truly interested in this sort of thing, I invite you to check out: http://www.unix.digital.com/cluster/in dex.html, which is the TruCluster site.
This is the sort of stuff I'd like to see on Linux. I'd help code it but, unfortunately, I have neither the time nor the skill (yet).
I am not, nor have I ever been, an employee of DEC/Compaq - but I have used their products in an enterprise class environment for both user (www, mail, ldap, etc) and database (oracle) services.
-Jeff
<ducks in the corner as the flames rise>
[*]: But I have been using Linux on my personal system since v1.2.8 (walnut creek slack aug 1995)
Damn, that must be the narrowest definition of "us" I've seen in a public forum. Is that "myself and the other 11 superelite uebermenschliche sys admins with 30 years experience scattered through the world in our mountaintop fortresses"?
I'm guessing it would take me a month or more to set up a high availability server. The second time I might be able to cut it down to a week. I don't think there are nearly as many gurus out there as you think. The last sys admin where I work now left because he got a better offer, but there are a lot of things in the system (cron jobs that fail every night; a web server named "mail", a mail server named "bkp") that make me he probably wouldn't be able to set up failover very easily.
Most Linux users, even experienced Linux users, don't know any more than how to keep it running, and how to set up what they've set up before. Being a Linux user doesn't mean one is an expert. Considering a graph of skill level for different OSs, Windows would have a nice broad distribution, centered around "knows how to do daily operations, but can't figure out new stuff on their own". Macs would be an even flatter distribution. Both more experts and more clueless newbies. Linux would be a much narrower distribution -- newbies *can't* use Linux, and to become an expert takes significantly longer than on Windows. But the average would be a little higher.
I'm thinking, what percentage of Linux users could do something as simple as have find delete all file in the home directory that hadn't been accessed in more than 90 days? How many would know where to look? How many would be able to understand the find syntax or know that they need to escape the semi colon? Why do you think pico ships with every Linux distro?
If you think about it, though, if you hire someone who could do this right, you'll probably be paying them about $50/hr as an employee, $75+ as a contractor. Figure a week to set it up, and that's $2000-$3000. And no support.
Of course, the disc will probably be on cheap bytes for $0.99 in a few weeks. Use that, and figure it out as you go.
--Kevin
Anyone good any good ideas what you're really paying for in this? $1995 sounds like quite a lot for a year of support... I'd sure hope the support services were somehting VERY extraordinary
Picture this: on-site support, preferably by a brunette sitting on your lap and fixing the cluster... =)
I have seen a recurring trend among the top linux distributions, which upsets me. Try to download a distribution other than a very basic one, and the companies make it difficult to impossible. Suse lets you get one of the six disks. Redhat gives you only the standard distribution. Turbolinus gives only the workstation install. I am not sure if this is exactly legal. If the distribution is using gpl software, doesn't it hve to be made available? Please respond, I am confused.
-- the computer doesn't want any beer, no matter how much you think it does. NEVER, EVER feed your computer beer.
This story strikes me as having some relevance with the story about Linux in Beijing that was posted last week. On first blush, this certainly seems like a "more choice, victory for Linux" type of situation, but now I'm not quite so sure.
We all know that the Chinese government would not trust any security-critical systems to Windows: the code could have easily been compromised by the NSA or the CIA or some other arm of the US government. This is the commonly-accepted reason why the Chinese government is pushing the acceptance of Linux (in addition to the fact that they like its fundamentally communist development model).
But think a little further: the US is desperately trying to put it regional missile defense into place, and China is ramping up its anti-US sentiments and dissident crackdowns even beyond their usual extremes. All this can only show that there is some incredible US / China tension building behind the scenes, which could easily escalate to war within a few years.
And when this war comes, do we really want China having the benefit of high-availability Linux servers? Do we really want to eliminate the chances of an accidental server crash that could end up saving the Western world? I think not. Letting the forces of communism run rampant on this planet is about the worst fate I could imagine for any of us.
That's bad enough. But now look at, first, Red Hat's timing of this launch (which I've already explained the significance of), and, second, Red Hat's name. RED Hat -- if that's not a sign that they're in league with the PRC, I don't know what is.
So, please - I urge you - for the world's future - boycott this product. When the shooting starts, you'll be glad you did.
Three cheers for open source companies with viable business models.
Actually we DO release it. ;)
We don't believe in proprietary software any more than Debian does.
The clustering tools are released under the terms of the GPL.
This message is provided under the terms outlined at http://www.bero.org/terms.html
Straight from the news item:
Support: A one year support package that includes standard hours installation and configuration assistance and 24x7 server-down support for two Linux Routers of a Piranha cluster, configuration of Piranha and Linux Virtual Server and any services required to run these applications, including httpd and ftpd, and configuration of Piranha and Linux Virtual Server for connectivity to one node behind the Linux Routers for either httpd or ftpd service.
For a business or organization, $2000 really isn't that much, especially when it gives management the right to point the finger at another company when something goes wrong...hence the importance of "Tech Support".
Please, if you don't like Linux, that's fine, but don't try to troll your way to infamy.
-=God Hates Me=-