Red Hat Announces Enterprise Linux

OldBen writes "RedHat has announced the product stable to replace the mainstream releases for enterprise use. RedHat Enterprise Linux AS replaces Advanced Server (with quite a price hike to go along), ES is targeted at "entry-level" servers, and WS is for workstations. See the details at RedHat's website."

Comments

Neato

[blitzoid]

Perhaps all these fancy titles with words like "Enterprise" in them will make large corporations see Linux as a solution for their projects. That's the main thing stopping linux... recognition.

Re:Neato

[Ed Avis]

I've usually found the word 'Enterprise' in the title to be a sure indication of a crap product. It sounds so 1999.

Re:Neato

[Telastyn]

Wait, I thought what was stopping Linux was the lack of a proper email/calendaring/contacts solution (server and client side, nicely integrated) that actually works. Every IT director and their dog knows about Linux given all the business magazine press it's gotten over the past few years.

Enterprise AS

[Visaris]

The price hike sounds entirely reasonable because of the increased support responsibilities involved. I'm actually kind of supprised they didn't raise the prices more.. Just my 2 cents.

Clarification requested

[m_evanchik]

Are Red Hat Enterprise Edition versions protected by any licensing requirements?

What parts are not open-source?

What's to stop someone from just posting ISO images online?

I'm just a little fuzzy on what's being paid for.

Thanks in advance for the answers

Re:Clarification requested

[Tack]

From RedHat's licence agreement:

• 4. REPORTING AND AUDIT. If Customer wishes to increase the number of Installed System, then Customer will purchase from Red Hat additional Services for each additional Installed System. During the term of this Agreement and for one (1) year thereafter, Customer expressly grants to Red Hat the right to audit Customer's facilities and records from time to time in order to verify Customer's compliance with the terms and conditions of this Agreement.

Can RedHat enforce this considering the software they're selling me is under open source licenses?

If so, then it seems that the costs are per year, per server. For RHL ES, at $350/year/server, my modest 4 server shop would cost me $1400 USD/year, or over $2200 CAD/year. I just don't have the budget for this.

Really, all I want is access to errata. I don't need phone support, or email support, or any fancy RHN monitoring. Just let me download errata binaries so I can upgrade my servers and I'm happy. I'm willing to pay for that, but not to the tune of $2200 a year. There doesn't seem to be such a solution offered by RedHat.

Jason.

Re:Pricing themselves out of the market?

[Pharmboy]

But one of the big advantages of Windows is support.

Adding to your comment, another factor is that Linux can GENERALLY run a bit faster on the same hardware, assuming you run a server at init 3 (who wouldnt?) This gives you a little more horsepower per server.

Also, a company MAY pay the $800 for a few boxes, but install a free version of Linux for other boxes. Maybe their dedicated DNS boxes don't need the support, or their POP boxes. As you stated, they don't have this option with windows. They can PAY for support on the ones they need, get the other free, and run the same basic OS on all of them.

Personally, I have a few servers, all running Linux, and I pay $60 from Redhat for up2date priority access (a freaking bargain). It also keeps with with ALL my servers, telling me what servers need what patches, i just have to download and install the other servers manually, which is no biggie. I gladly have the $60 annual on autorenew, because I have the choice to run one for pay, the others for free. From my experience, RedHat offers good value.

Does Enterprise offer Indemnity protection?

[spookymonster]

My company won't go to Linux until they find a vendor willing to offer indemnity protection against lawsuits claiming we're using copyrighted software. To date, Red Hat has refused to do so. Our opinion is that it's the distro's responsibility, not the end-user. Does the Enterprise edition offer anything like this?

Re:What price hike ??

[Anonymous Coward]

We have several AS seats in house, and I basically agree with you. I should point out a couple of things:

1) ES will work for most people (those who do not need extra large memory, cpu, or clustering support). In fact, most of our servers do not use OS clustering and have 4 or less cpus, so ES would seem to work. But, we do run a fair number of 6gb ram Oracle boxes. And we would have to pay the AS prices for these boxes, even though we really do not need the greater support/features. We could build our own kernels with the necessary mods, but that gets troublesome with any large number of boxes, and we want them to take care of revisioning after all.

2) For those of you saying you can use apt-get, or freshmeat or whatever else, remember that the binaries for AS 2.1, for example, are not available via these means. If you do not want to compile yourself, you have to have the correct entitlement (and RH seems to have prevented advanced users from switch machine to machin at rhn.redhat.com, like you can do with workstations or demos). All is fair in love and war, and since I have been playing in the UNIX world for quite a while now, I am not too surprised. I would like the "download binaries/updates for $60 a year with no other support for the AS versions" option, though. Many of the 7.3 packages work for AC 2.1, but enough of them do not to make it a pain.