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?"
Usually, enterprises aren't interested in free or next to it. They want stable and supported for a stable price.
I think the first thing that should be asked is, what do you need to do with it? Distros have a strengths and weaknesses. If you just ask, what distro, you end up with a giant flame war over which distro is better. Also, Have you considered possibly using a version of *BSD?
Slashdot...it's like Fox news, but without the biased sl...or maybe not.
I think the whole point is support. With redhat, you're really paying for support - that's the whole point of paying.
With Debian, you don't get any support (IRC and google don't count when you've got to have a problem solved for your business in seconds. In these situations, "dial a tech-support number" == "support").
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
What do you want? Enterprise-level support without paying for it? Do you think that the support contracts offered by HP, IBM, Sun, or Microsoft will have more value for less money?
This is the Free Software movement, not the Free Support movement. You can still download the software for free, and pay some kids $20 an hour to support it if that's what you want. Quit complaining that the world doesn't give you everything you want for free.
The value of Red Hat for an enterprise is not that the software is free of charge. The value of Red Hat is that the source is free from restrictions. Other than that, they're just like any other enterprise Unix vendor.
Support, you say? Debian has a nice directory of qualified Debian consultants, and in general, it makes sense to have a few Linux experts inhouse to deal with emergencies.
How many hours of Redhat support did you use last year? Divide the number of hours into the support contract cost. If the hourly rate is over $100, (and I'm betting it will be way over) consider getting on-demand support from independent consultants, instead of using a pre-paid contract. Some consultants will even let you buy reasonable (e.g., 10 hour) blocks of support time, which you can use in small (5-15 minute) increments. You have MANY support options. Explore them to see which will save you the most.
Use any savings for training. As your in-house expertise increases, your support costs will decrease. The nice thing about Linux is you only have to pay for the support you need. Too many companies forget that.
Learn to use Google effectively too; 99.9% of all Linux questions I get in a year have already been answered, and are just a quick inquiry away.
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
Have you considered calling / writing to Red Hat's sales section with your concerns? You may be able to negotiate a more acceptable price. Especially where there's such a significant sum involved.
==========
Error in module creativity.dll : Unable to create witty comment.
Abort / Retry / Ignore ?
The new "low cost" server option at my company is RHAS on a dual Xeon box connected to a huge EMC disk for network storage. F*$%ing overkill, bigtime. And they wonder why we can't do anything cheaply. This is the small, minimum production grade server standard embraced. JHMFC.
In my opinion (not so humbly, though), the only thing you're getting from big, expensive RH is the guarantee that Oracle will support whatever f-ed up configuration you come up with. It's still GNU/Linux at heart (there, RMS, ya happy now?) Sure, RH promises not to change it as often, but honestly I just upgraded an old RH server running 6.2. It's been running and stable for something like four years. It worked, so aside from patching and security, I left it the hell alone. This is something that large companies can't understand. Once it works, don't upgrade every damn chance you get - keep the old solid configuration running until you have the time and the need to do an upgrade.
Personally, since I believe that having three truly hard-core linux geeks that know their shit onsite is better than any professional support line you could ever call, I'd go with standard RH and order me some geeks instead. For $350k, you should be able to get a very nice set of them, and they'll be right there to save your ass if anything goes wrong.
This is why I have no future management prospects. I just can't think that way - I worked in small shops too long to think that throwing money at stuff fixes anything. We found ways to keep stuff running on a mix-and-match room full of old hardware - no support contracts, no officially supported configurations, just guys (and one lady) that knew what the hell they were doing. Once I moved into the big corporate world, I had to give myself a lobotomy to even understand their mindset towards problem-solving.
I'd consider this when getting the level of support you have priced from RH. Think about it: will there be many questions for which you are willing to pay $1000 a pop? Are there many questions to which you couldn't find an answer by Googling? Or is it more of a CYA action in case your team fouls up? I'd hate to think you'd be wasting over a quarter million dollars for an inept admin.
--Chag
Well, the $350k/year he is talkin about can hire quite some 24/7 on-site support. For Debian too. Just put some good people on the payroll.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Orr.. Geee.. run Solaris (x86)
At $350K to upgrade, you are talking a serious number of systems. I'm not saying you can talk them into giving it to you for free but whoever is doing the purchasing should be able to negotiate something better than full retail. You are mainly buying support so things to point out include multiple identical systems, internal support for end-user systems, etc. that mean they won't have to answer too many really dumb questions.
Favorite really dumb support question: do I have to plug it into the electricity?
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
That got moderated funny?
/. all the time that Debian is so out of date and how terrible it is that they only get one release out the door per year, if that. However, in the enterprise, upgrading everything once per year is painful. In an enterprise, you can't just change your apt sources and upgrade in place. We get a window - say, one hour - to perform an upgrade. That means that I have to have a machine built and ready to go, other than syncing the data across during my window, and get it back up, and have a way to fail back (still in that window!) if something goes wrong. This means I have to rebuild every Debian box in the company once a year. (Because we standardize our base install, and have scripted all of our application installs, building new machines is extremely fast for us, to the tune of 20 minutes or so, but it's still a lot of work to re-QA our applications once a year.) For this reason, we only use Debian where version upgrades go pretty easily - BIND, Apache, Postfix, FTP servers, etc, where the Debian-supplied versions consistantly work right out of the box. We use Red Hat Enterprise for complicated commercial software (Oracle), where the long support cycle means we only have to go through the fun of upgrades once every several years.
I work in a mid-size enterprise, and we're using Debian with great success, for most of our unix needs.
The right distribution is highly dependant on what your specific needs are, though. Here are some things to consider:
1) Debian doesn't provide direct commercial support. Tech support is available from third parties, but by the time you get a support contract that will equal the quality of support you get from Red Hat, it'll probably cost as much as Red Hat (or Solaris, or Windows, or anything for that matter). Saving money is a priority for us, so we simply self-support. We maintain our own baseline install, and take care of certifying our own apps against Debian as needed. It's worked very well for us, but if you need CYA, Debian may not be a good choice.
2) Debian's release cycle is too fast. Yes, I know you hear it from people on
3) Oracle doesn't support Debian. Sure, it installs, sure, it runs fine, but that doesn't mean it's officially supported. This means that when you call their tech support, they will laugh at you the moment they think it's an OS problem. And, despite being head over heels in love with Debian, I think Oracle made the right choice - Enterprise customers who are going to install an application that needs to be in use for several years need to evaluate several other factors than just how easy an OS is to install and even how good the quality of the software is on the OS. I firmly believe that Debian builds a better mouse trap, but for Oracle, I want an OS that has official commercial support and a long life cycle - Red hat Enterprise.
Despite all this, don't think I'm trying to say that Debian is a bad choice. As I said at the beginning, we use it extensively for many functions throughout our enterprise, with tremendous success. Regardless, you need to evaluate your needs against ANY distribution, to see if it's a good match.
--Keepiru
--slashsuckATvegaDOTfurDOTcom
One of the nice things regarding Debian is that basically all it is is a set of installed packages - no extra magic, basically. Creating a local mirror is as easy as creating a local APT source and storing all the packages there, and then instead of running apt-get update on the machines, run apt-get update on the mirror PC, which updates all of them. If the mirror PC works fine, then copy all the packages to the local APT source, and boom, you're fine. The details here are sketchy, yah, but it's an easy problem.
Regarding the security patches, I honestly don't know what problem you have with them: maybe Debian has really improved security support since then, but if you check Debian's page, you'll see that security.debian.org's response time is just as fast as any of the other major distros. There are several bugs for which Debian had a package that fixed the problem first (the SSH bug that required privsep comes to mind).
And honestly, I have NO idea what problem you had where a package broke something badly, unless you were running unstable. In my experience, Debian's packages are FAR less likely to break a system than some random less-0.4.3-mdk3-only-work-on-a-sunday.rpm. The few problems I've had were dumb problems that were immediately obvious (and in fact were stupid user errors, as I forced an upgrade of a package without forcing the upgrade of its neighbors).
I've never been happier since I converted my lab's PCs to all Debian. Yah, it's small, but I have to handle something like 7-10 PCs, and having them all in almost exactly the same state (which is far harder to do in Red Hat than in Debian) is SO nice.
I mean, the main reason Debian stable is farther behind than everyone else is because they take their time. When they mean stable, they really really mean stable - not just stable as in 'won't crash', but stable as in 'will do what it says it does'.
$350k/year won't really get you very far at all for a well-staffed IT department. You're going to end up paying out the nose for any systems administrator who specifically addresses critical problems, as opposed to the more mundane IT staff who may deploy patches, ensure systems are running properly and not experiencing memory leaks, random errors, etc. Assume that you're paying $70,000 for a Linux sysadmin who's experienced enough to handle all the problems that none of the other guys can manage on their own (which is the entire point of the pay support in the first place). You can hire five of these people. Splitting them into 24/7 support (3 shifts, plus weekends), you essentially have one person at any given time managing 500 servers ($350,000 divided by $700, the cost of a Red Hat Enterprise ES license).
Outsourcing is really a much better option than hiring these people.
I'm estimating that you have 150-200 servers (depending on what RH package you get). If those servers aren't generating revenue, or supporting a business unit that generates revenue, it's time to downsize your datacenter. $350K sounds like a lot of money, but it's all relative to revenue. If it's only 2% of last quarters revenue, then why would you consider making a huge IT change just to save a few bucks. Again, if $350K is really a lot of money for your business to be spending on OS upgrades, than maybe it's time to downsize that datacenter because it's not generating the revenue to justify it's existance.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
To demonstrate that if a company starts acting like MS it gets treated like MS. I'd take a hard look at the transition costs moving to SuSe. It'll take some testing, no transition is painless. I like Suse Enterprise servers, so I'll admit to some bias. Hey, you have to have standards. When a Linux provider starts acting like MS (forced upgrades, ever escalating prices) maybe it's time to bitch-slap them back into line.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I've been trying to figure this out, and it would seem that there is nothing in the license that stops you being able to legally give me a copy of (say) RHES, and for me to run that copy, with no access to up2date and no support contract. (Like a lot of the other posts say, I am the support - my only concern is having a platform that commercial software supports!)
The license seems to refer to the services that come bundled with the software, not the software itself. I believe that the JVM cannot be copied from the standard distribution but removing is trivial.
Interesting notes: to summarise, it's probably perfectly legal for you to copy me RHEL ES, however you would probably also have to provide me all the updates if I wanted them (which may violate your license to receive them). The big dollars is with regard to the updates, and I believe they are made publically available by SRPM - and even then, its probably also technically allowable for you to mirror all the update RPMs somewhere.
I installed Lotus Domino recently on a Debian server because I didn't trust the machine with a consumer Red Hat and it wasn't cost effective enough to get RHEL. I'd be very interested to hear if you can or can't just copy/mirror RHEL.
Actually, no. That *used* to be the case, but if that was the only thing, it wouldn't be that expensive.
What you're paying for is certification. Wanna run Oracle? Well, if you want to get Oracle's "unbreakable" support, you have to run it on a certified OS. Getting that certification costs $$$, and lots of 'em.
It's the same with a number of other production applications - if you want support from the vendor, you have to run an OS that they support. If you've got your own home-grown kernel and you start having problems, how are they to know that some crap you put in there isn't hosing things up? And it's certainly not feasible for them to support ever kernel-(user) release out there - so they pick the biggest fish (RedHat).
For your servers that don't run production systems, just use the regular Red Hat and buy support (if not from Red Hat, then somewhere else - the beauty of open source). Or run Debian/SuSe/Mandrake/whatever. Doesn't really matter, so long as your *production* machines are certified.