Slashdot Mirror
The Increasing Cost of Red Hat Linux?
An Anonymous Coward asks: "I work at a company with a large number of Linux servers in the data center. We're currently evaluating what distribution we want to use moving forward. Upgrading to Red Hat Enterprise from 7.2 would cost ~$350k just for the systems we already have deployed. Due to the change in Red Hat's release policy, we either have to move to Enterprise, or change distributions. Also, we don't have Oracle on any of these systems, but we will need it in the future. This leaves us with rather limited options. I'm interested hearing what other Slashdot readers are running, and planning?"
Buy one support licence and use it on all your machines, its GPL you don't need hundreds of copies of RH Advanced Server.
There is no god
And with a reasonable IT staff to begin with and a linux deployment, you call support what, once every few years??? These people aren't there to do work your existing staff does now! These people are there to do their own work, like I don't know, building rpms with security patches in them after redhat stops (you could easily get someone with the knowledge to do this correctly for $25k btw).
These guys are there to find solutions to the problems nobody else can solve, they aren't there to setup servers, someone is obviously already doing that, or make ghost images or structure the network (although it might not hurt to have them review these things). Critical problems occur rarely enough (especially with a linux deployment) that if you can really set someone aside for them and give them the authority to axe those who come with problems that AREN'T critical, than 500 servers is nothing.
Sony Electronics has one support center in the united states for every piece of sony electronics equiptment in the nation... the calls that come in range from ridiculous to serious. 200 (at max capacity, like the week of christmas) support personal service the entire sony customer base and maintain less than a 30min response time.
I am annonyed. Why is a "Ask slashdot" post being made by a anonymouse coward?
First off I don't know that many people who thinks "Ask slashdot" is productive to getting any good response.
Anyone who bases their business decisions on a "ask slashdot" should be shot. Cause that's a very good way to utterly fuck up your business/project/thingie/life.
Few if anyone here is going to give you a 20 page reply about what they use and why they used it. Without a detailed report any response you get would be no better then doing research on your own.
So please for the sake of not making slashdot a dumb and stupid place stop posting these kinds of questions!