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HP To Sell And Support Red Hat Linux
Dman33 writes "Redhat Linux seems to be gaining an even stronger share in the server and workstation market as HP is announcing worldwide sales and support of the popular distro. Infoworld has a writeup on the announcement and the press release straight from HP is a good read regarding the initiative."
Completely different target customers, at least for the time being.
HP will probably ship linux on it's x86 based servers, but for the various HP3000/9000 etc big-iron servers, it'll still be HP-UX. I sincerely doubt that linux will have the punch that HP-UX carries on a bigass HP9000 N-class server.
Eventuall HP-UX and Tru64 will no doubt follow MPE into the lands of obscurity. Although, there are still a ton of MPE users/customers out there (my company being one of them with a few dozen MPE based sites installed).
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Announcements like this always say "workstations and servers". Don't they think that Linux users want portable devices?
I just want a good quality Linux laptop with firewire, a built-in CDR, lots of RAM, and a power-efficient CPU. I don't want to pay the Windows tax and I don't want an expensive, high speed CPU.
(Why the heck anyone needs a 2 GHz CPU in a laptop is a mystery to me. )
The Lindows "$799" machine would have been perfect but it has no built in CD drive - a fatal deficiency, at least to me.
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
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Not for what we use it for. Linux is great for smaller servers and development, but we have machines with terabytes and terabytes of data running on super stable hardware that has features the Linux people are just talking about.
Plus, if/when Linux is ready it won't be too hard to switch as most of what we run on these machines is pretty standard, they are moving from PA-RISC to Intel Itanium, and support contracts only last a few years. Either way, HP gets our money.
why would any new customers buy in to HP-UX?
Because they're willing to pay a premium for high performance PA-RISC system with loads of processors. Same market as big Sun and IBM machines. Same market that Linux won't eat yet for a couple of years. But you're right - if price is the determining decision in the purchase, Lintel is The Way to Go.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
Anyone who had to mess with the wacky 9u Compaq server hardware of a couple of years ago and wanted to run Linux on knows that Compaq (before HP) and RedHat we're holding hands a long time before this announcement. Not kissing or petting, but there was a tacit agreement that Compaq supported the RedHat distros (6.x and 7.x series) and RedHat made sure to roll their SCSI array drivers into the mix. They were good friends, and probably even exchanged a couple of "partner" trinkets over the years.
Before this, Dell was the RedHat "Daddy". That was probably before Michael Dell and Steve Ballmer had a couple of meetings and came to the agreement that Linux was bad for Dell in the "consumer space", which somehow included their laptops, and their website. Anyone remember the "powerapp" boxen. They were good, and came with RH 6.2 and 7.0 distros. That was before "Red the Hat", decided to really mess up their distro.
This latest announcement is a "Stock market Ad" designed to make both HP and RedHat look better than usual (warty beasts with scrabbling claws and pale lidless eyes which cannot withstand the brilliant light of full-disclosure) and to signal that server clients and channel partners can "Have RedHat, we mean Linux, with that".
And after RedHat's 8.x they can eat their distro one mylar shard at a time...I'll be nice and let them choose which end they want it in, because it's never going to see my servers again. Ever.
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