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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?"
Switch to BSD! I hear FreeBSD is nice. Also in the enterprise. And a license that does not make $neckties nervous.
For your Oracle instances, I HIGHLY recommend their Advanced Server. I've seen it in action and it is impressive. I would consider it to be worth the cost.
For everything else, CHANGE distributions. SUSE, Debian, Mandrake, ASP, Rawhide, pick one. Or ditch linux all together and use FreeBSD. If you guys are used to Solaris, FreeBSD will be a very simple transition. The other BSD's are good too, but Free is closer to Solaris, IMHO. I've found that my experience with Solaris has translated to it quite nicely. In addition, the documentation is fabulous.
HTH,
Queen B
Jimi
HDGary secures my bank
You can buy support for Debian.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The strategy I'm taking is to use the RedHat high end products for running commercial applications (like Oracle). For everything else, standard RedHat is fine. The developers like that RedHat keeps pace with the new stuff they're working on.
/etc/sysconfig, /etc/profile.d, etc... very modular.
The advent of http://www.fedora.us bodes well for the future. I expect to see more 3rd party support for the RedHat standard package. That's the nice thing about RedHat finally opening up their devel process.
At worst, you could just take the standard distro that RedHat bases their advanced products on and use the security patches from the advanced on the standard distro. For example, install RedHat 7.2 and install any patches from the currently support advanced product. The only thing is that you'll have to rpmbuild --rebuild the src.rpm's as they are released.
I really like RedHat's way of doing things. I like their python based configuration programs. I like
And who'd 've thunk... RedHat is basicallly IPv6 ready out of the box. I didn't notice that until recently. Very easy to setup 6to4, radvd, etc. Even Mozilla is compiled with --enable-ipv6. Thanks RedHat!
My company has hired a small independent Linux technical support provider to help with this.. They have a service where they create patches and updates for RH 6.2-8.0 when new security vulnerabilities are out. They test them, package them as RPM, and distribute. So when 12/31/2003 comes around, you don't have to upgrade to 9.0 if it isn't feasible.
Its kind of expensive and may not work for everyone, but its worth a look:
http://www.pantek.com/linux.php?subsect=rhupdates
In this economy when the "big" Linux players are worried about the "big" issues, I prefer working with a smaller company like these guys because they work harder to make their mark.
You can buy support for Debian, yes. But when the packages will be updated... that's another question.
:)
Now don't get me wrong, I like Debian, I use it on my personal servers. However I recall then whe last sendmail exploit came out it took a few days for the patch to be released. I tried to inquire when it would be coming out and was rudely told, "We don't comment on such things."
apt-get is a wonderful tool. But until patches are brought out in a more timely fashion I can't in good concience recommend it to any of my clients.
The other issue I've found, but I'll admit haven't put a lot of time into finding the solution for, is having a local mirror. When I build a server, if that server were to die, I want to be able to create the exact same version again of all packages. I have run into the situation with Debian of a package being upgraded and breaking things. Though as I said, this is something which is probably solved by now since I haven't looked into this issue in about 2 years.
Once these issues are resolved, go Debian go! I know we're facing the Redhat issue at the end of the year... upgrade all out RH7.3 machines to 9 by the end of the year... or risk not having security patches. I feel bad for the admin of the local 96 node beowulf. I'm glad I put RH9 on my new cluster....
There, my rant for the day.
I'm not saying it's the answer to your problem, I don't know, you'll have to decide.
Now, before we move on I'm going to tell you how Debian sucks. This is not to say that other distributions do not suck, or that Debian sucks more or less than the others - this is just something that you might run in to and should be aware of.
Debian sucks because:
Yet, we chose Debian because it rocks (and RH sucks) in these areas:
For a server you put in a data center and don't want to touch again unless absolutely necessary, I think Debian is great. It is extremely easy to stay up to date with security, and that is pretty much all there is to it. I still have nightmares from the days where I was mirroring entire RedHat distribution trees (or at least their massive update directories) in order to keep those systems up.
But really - in the end - it is not a few hundred bucks per server that should make the difference. It is my impression that if you pay for your RedHat, you can have a nice update service as well.
You'll be shelling out thousands of dollars per server for the hardware, an order of magnitude more (over the years) for support (eg. your time), so a RedHat subscription fee really shouldn't stop you from going RH.
On the other hand, if some of the above made you think - I can promise you that Debian certainly is a viable alternative at least for the machines I've dealt with so far.
I personally believe that Slackware is the best server implantation that you can go with. It's the most Unix distro IMHO. Also you deal with source files, not RPM's, personally I greatly dislike the use of binaries. The best thing is that Slackware is Free, and it's stable. I know a lot of different people whom have had problems with Redhat, switched them over to Slackware, which has a slightly higer learning curve, but, they were happy with Slack.
We have been using RH 7.3 for some time now in our cluster configuration.
Now we wanted to upgrade for various reasons and we really dont want to have to do the upgrade manually each time so we looked at RH. Damn its expencive. It's way to expencive when you have to pay a license pr. server, so we switched to SuSE Enterprise server (Oracle Certisfied)
Now we do automatic upgrade/patch of all servers using only one License. Also everything seems to be running much more stable. We have a FC connection to an external diskarray RH crashed several times using this array, also the webserver made some strange hicups from time to time (Also with RH9), but after changing to SuSE we're moved away from these problems.
Also.. when talking about support. RH is difficult since they only reply to web support, slow and it's very very hard to describe the problems for them. SuSE on the other hand replies to mails, are fast and very helpful and service minded.
You are high, or highly misinformed.
RedHat continues to develop a public release
the beta for the next release (redhat 10) is available right now for public consumption. The simply aren't providing shrink wrap at compusa anymore, I think what the original story is referring to is the fact that each public release is only supported for 1 year, which is unacceptable in a corporate environment, to have to upgrade the OS of production boxes every year is not acceptable, and therefore requires that people move to ES, because it has 5 years of support.
> Of course, the nice gui installer is not free
Sure it is. It's called Anaconda, and everything you need to make your own customized version is included in the anaconda package in Red Hat, licensed under the GPL.
You're probably thinking of SuSE's installer.
Hello, enterprise Debian user here. :-)
.deb packages of our applications.
We manage consistant, reproducable server installs by NOT using the Debian installer. We install it once, and then make tarballs of the install, which we untar to install the server. We have it all scripted, so we can boot a machine off of a CD, run a script, answer 5 questions and have a server ready to go in about 10 minutes, and have the applications working (also script-installed) in another 10 minutes. We maintain our own OS release numbers (versions of our base tarball), and our own
For mirroring: We use debmirror. (It's a Debian package, of course.)
When upgrades fail: Go into aptitude, find the package that the upgrade broke, scroll down to the bottom, and highlight the old version, hit + to install it. It'll gracefully downgrade for your convenience. It's a hell of a lot easier than downgrading on, say, Solaris.
--Keepiru
--slashsuckATvegaDOTfurDOTcom
Hey, have you ever tried System Installation Suite? IBM really pushes it for clusters and large installations.
Intelligent Life on Earth
Actually, you could only hire about 2 $70K sysadmins for that money. An employee usually costs close to 2 times his/her salary.
ok, I have to call you on this. The last vulnerability that affected both RedHat and Debian's sendmail was fixed on the same day by both. (3/31)
Please point out a specific case that is actually true before making inflamatory statements like this.
one command:
dpkg --get-selections > list_of_packages
it's right there in the documentation. Yes, even though it is mean some times to tell people to RTFM, it's not always a bad idea.
-Mark
What the hell are you smoking? Why don't you actually READ the license?
Red Hat Linux Advanced Server 2.1
How exactly does the license prohibit free copying or redistribution of their product? As far as I understand, if you don't want support, you can just buy one copy and use it on all your computers. Or use somebody else's copy on your computers. You can even redistribute it if you remove redhat's trademarks. This is way, way, way better than what SuSE offers.
BTW, Mandrake uses a practically identical license for their server products.
I first want to say that I think Redhat is insane with their new pricing. I understand that they want to make money, but they need to make some serious changes to their current model.
Next, what you said about email support only isn't true for the Enterprise version. You get to call them, and their support is good.
I am in the exact same boat as the guy who posted this, and considered SuSE and RedHat. Here is how it broke down for me. I also need to run Oracle...
RedHat
$350 / server without phone support or upgrade protection, but you get up2date for a year, and some basic (email) install support. In my opinion it makes no sense to buy this version, given that 3.x of their product will be out this year, and that version will offer things like LVM install built in (and a lot of other things), and you would be forced to buy that version for $350.
$800 / server with "Normal business hours support" and upgrade protection for one year. This version is limited to 2 processors and 4 GIG of memory.
RedHat had more expensive options but these two covered my company needs.
SuSE
$700 / server per processor. Support included. Also Opteron support.
With both products the cost seems to be for support and you will need to pay them EVERY year some amount of money. I would put that amount down, but my belief is that it will change given market demand. Also it must be noted that neither one allows you to load a copy of it on a "test" or "development" box! You must plunk down the $350-$800 again!
What I wish RedHat would do is allow you to download the Enterprise edition and install it on as many machines as you want for a nominal price. Say like $300 / processor. (NOTE don't limit processors/RAM ect) but pay for Up2date and then offer a support packs. Specifically they need to offer like 10 calls to them for $5,000. Novell and Microsoft currently offer agreements like this and it works well. They could then offer a pack of 50 for a discount and so on...
When I approched RedHat about this they seem to believe that their competition is Sun and even with this pricing they are still cheaper than Sun, so it makes sense to them. I don't agree with this! They may take away 10% of Suns business, but they WERE taking away more than 1% of Microsofts business, and the fact is that 1% of Microsoft's share is a heck of a lot more than 10% of Suns.
Now one last point in favor of RedHat. Oracle DB Standard Edition charges $15k/cpu + support + maintanence. That comes to around $22k/processor then you have to pay support + maintanence EVERY year. That comes to around $5k EVERY year to Oracle. If your company can handle that, then throwing RedHat a bone every year shouldn't be too bad. It just seems extra bad because it use to be near free.
Also, DB2, Websphere and other IBM apps have the same requirements as Oracle in regards to Linux distros, so it appears that the "big business" has kinda dictated what RedHat and SuSE will do.
The more I learn about science, the more my faith in God increases.
I say go with SuSE Enterprise Server.
It has some nice features like remote auto install and YaST for a very nice system installer and maintainer.
SuSE Enterprise also supports x86, IBM mainframe, I/P series IBM servers, Itanium2 and AMD Opteron processors. This gives you a lot of flexability to add new hardware to the network to improve performance and the knowledge that the new machines will run perfectly with exsisting servers.
SuSE also has great tech support services at a much lower rate than redhat. You can feel confident that your server software is also run by the German Government and praised! by them.
SuSE's max turnaround time for support is just 2 hours!
SuSE is also United Linux Compatible and LSB compliant.
Suse Prices are not too bad either:
x86 single server 749USD$
Itanium Single server 448USD$
Opteron Single CPU 448USD$
Opteron Dual CPU 767USD$
Opteron Quad CPU 1405USD$
Opteron 8 CPU 2585USD$
These include 1 Year Maintainance and Service.
With that many machines, you'll get better pricing. The organization that I work for (which is huge, but has about 200 linux boxes) pays approximately $200/box.
For us, it was worth it because we are guaranteed a supply of patches & support for a minimum of five years. Red Hat public releases churn every 18 months or so, which is too much work to maintain.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
...responsible for several Redhat servers and workstations, I can tell you that we're beginning the process of switching to Debian.
Stable (if some of the software is a little outdated), easy to maintain and upgrade, no registration required to use apt (see how far you get on RHN without that), and far cheaper.
In that case, drop RedHat.
Others offer Linux without this problem.
E.g. SuSE allows you to install their enterprise version on as many machines you like. You buy as many licenses as you like. The only limitation is that you get support only for the number of machines that you licensed.
So when you want to save money you just buy licenses for a couple of the most important servers, or for each server of a certain kind.
(e.g. you run 50 fileservers, you license less than that, and when there is a "problem with fileservers" you let them support one of the licensed servers and you apply the fix they supply to all 50 of them.
As far as I remember, what was different about RHAS compared to normal Redhat is that the AS version supports Asynchronous I/O, which standard versions of Linux don't have.
Asynchronous I/O allows the Oracle server to hand off disk writes to the OS, without having to hang around to find out whether it wrote ok. If your OS doesn't support asynchronous I/O, you have to simulate it with I/O Slaves, which is much slower.