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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?"
Debian works well and the price is right! Wonderful install procedure too.
And I'm planning to go home and play America's Army.
I may need to reboot 3-6 hours from now, but I've never had to learn how to edit a configuration file.
(Disclaimer: That's not really true, but you get the point.)
paintball
Usually, enterprises aren't interested in free or next to it. They want stable and supported for a stable price.
How much more would Suse cost? I have worked at facilities before that switch from windows to Suse recently and they said it was a lot less expensive in the long run.
[RIAA] says its concern is artists. That's true, in just the sense that a cattle rancher is concerned about its cattle.
does that cost include count the SCO license?
oh come on, thats not flamebait!
We made the upgrade. Its a godd choice. You know what you get, you get oracle/ibm/big gun stuff.
AND
you support open source / free software.
Have you evaluated the cost of moving to the supported versions of SuSE, etc? What's the cost there? How does it compare to Red Hat?
Also, if you find you don't need support, then why use the "enterprise" editions at all?
Finally, what'd be the total cost of moving to Windows? Probably a lot more than $350k, I'd wager. It sucks, but it's probably just time to pay the piper, or deal with supporting yourself... that's just how the market is. RH have to make a profit somehow.
The Free desktop that Just Works
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.
If you're looking for support (which is what I'm assuming your reason for going with Enterprise server is), then either pay for Advance Server or go with a different cheaper distribution and put the money you saved into someone that can search Google and find out how to make "RH only" stuff work on Debian or something.
We run oracle (both 8 and 9) on Debian, as well as most of our internet infrastructure (with the exception of proprietary programs that are stuck on Win2K for the time being). Most of the vendors of Linux based apps that we have worked with are willing to provide support even with Debian being the distro we chose (and then the ones that have complained, I've just called for another technician that was more distro-agnostic and gotten right through).
Debian. Or Slackware. Just be sure to have a copy of either Knoppix or Slackware Live CD handy. Write down what the CD auto-detected. Select appropriate odules when installing proper distro.
And MySQL for the database.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Switch to BSD! I hear FreeBSD is nice. Also in the enterprise. And a license that does not make $neckties nervous.
You can just make your own build of redhat. Every piece of the OS is available as source rpms from redhat themselves, for every linux OS they sell.
Get em, compile em and install em. Of course, the nice gui installer is not free, nor is the support. But updates and the OS itself is free and will always be free. Its GPL'd. What you pay for is support and peace of mind. Thats typically what data centers prefer these days. I know that the managers see only free as in beer, so they look like heroes for saving on the budget, but what really counts is uptime and reliability. TCO stuff. So it costs 350K... How much would Windows cost you, and how much functionality would get from it? How about the equivilant PA-RISC machines or big AIX boxes? E15k's?
It turns out to be quite a deal! The support you get is worth it, and compare the price of that to a support contract with Sun!
You need to look at what you are paying for, and what you need. With Redhat you're paying for a package (eg, physical box of stuff), some of their packaging expertise, a small amount of their own custom goo, and presumably support. You're also indirectly funding GNU and Linux development. If that's not worth $350k, there are a number of options out there.
I personally use FreeBSD. No, I'm not suggesting you switch, but since I use it I'll detail it as another point of view. I download the software, for free, and pay no licenses. I also don't get a pretty box, support, and I've done nothing to fund development. The pretty box is available, for a fee. Support is available from a number of companies, for a fee. You can fund development as much or as little as you like with donations.
Without telling us what you need, we're not going to be able to make a recomendation. Maybe you use some Red Hat "feature" a lot that's worth $350k/yar, maybe you don't. What I can tell you is there are more expensive (price Microsoft!), and less expensive (eg, FreeBSD) options. There are also many, many, many options in the middle.
If you are sick of RedHat's extortive licensing fees that you instead switch to Windows XP... :)
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
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!
Red Hat are in business to make money - they do this by providing paid-for distributions with full support, custom-tweaked kernels and applications, and provide a validated platform on which to run commercial apps like Oracle.
Want to put that together yourself? Go for it, nobody at Redhat is stopping you. All the stuff they integrate in their product is free, just go do it yourself.
But don't complain because you can't do it yourself and don't see why you should pay Redhat to provide you with a quality product.
Its not like you don't have a choice of vendors, or that your apps only run on a single vendor's platform.
Linux is never free - you either pay for it with money, or you pay for it with your commitment to the GPL and/or the time you invest into making it work for you.
We need people like you in the Linux community i.e. 'waah waah linux is too expensive, even when i can download it for free' like we need a frickin hole in the head.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
Debian is as stable as you can get. If they want the support, they can hire someone to do it in house (and in doing so contribute back to the movmement), or pay another company for support. The cost either way will undoubtedly be less then shelling out more than $350K for Red Hat, licenses. I Vote DEBIAN, but I am sure would work as well ;0)
Fuzzy_The_Quantum_Duck
=0)
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Damn Slashdot cut the last 2 Chars from my name!!!
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.
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.
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.
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.
But this puts you in violation of your support license, resulting in its termination and therefore not being supported if they catch you.
However, this will result in the same level of support as if you still had a support license.
Never take recommendations from anyone who spells the word with two c's and just one m.
Laugh stupid, it's a joke.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
SuSe is cheaper than AS, how much cheaper i do not know. but unlike most distro's they offer an "Enterprise Edition."
They also offer priced to fit support, and now have the backing of IBM and Sun, and they support oracle.
and this is coming from a Gentoo zealot.
"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the the universe." --Albert Einstein
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.
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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.
Several months ago Red Hat announced a number of changes to their product line, included in these changes was what ammounts to dropping their stable free product (from now on the free version will be at best the unstable .0 releases), the more stable and supported product will only be available in their Enterprise software, the license for the Enterprise software comes close to violating the GPL at least in spirit.
Ike
p.s. I am sure that others with more specific facts will post the details soon
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
I was personally involved in porting our company's software to Linux. I chose to support Red Hat, thinking that their big name would mean that they were somehow better as an organization.
I WAS TOTALLY WRONG!
I recently tried phoning Red Hat Sales to try and buy support, and it has been more than 1 week, and I have been unable to get them to respond! My first 3 attempts to contact Sales were ignored, and finally I got someone on the phone. They directed me to someone else, and after an initial e-mail, they have yet to contact me after I sent them 2 follow-up e-mails. It is absolutely ridiculous.
You would in this day-and-age that Red Hat would be salivating over someone who is willing to pay them money for support, but they seem competely disinterested in helping me give them money. I have already complained to my superiors that we should consider supporting a different flavor of Linux, because if this is how responsive Red Hat's Sales unit is, imagine how unresponsive their Support unit it.
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.
For $300k/year I will support it.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Fast forward to end of 2002, and we had become disgusted with Red Hat's road map for its' Advanced Server license. It seemed as though we had lost all of the benefits of the GPL.
There was no way we were going back to M$, but there was a movement from higher up top to change distributions. To make a long story short, we passed on SuSe and chose the often corporately overlooked Gentoo.
The benefits of this move are stunning. We have been able to hire 16 additional employees to handle our own fork of Portage, and 22 additional employees to provide support. Not only to we do a "ghost compile" for each box (many different Pentium and Athlon systems), we also take a minimalist approach. The combination of those two choices have enabled us to increase performance per box to something like 26% faster on average.
With the obvious help of the Gentoo open source community, we have created a low cost, self-sustained IT department that can function well into the next decade. Thanks Gentoo!
Here's what you do:
1. Hire 1-5 high school Linux geeks part-time.
2. Pay them 15-20k a year. They will rejoice! Sweeten the deal with an unlimited supply of Twinkies, Mountain Dew and Hot Pockets.
3. Sit back.
4. In your next conference with the big cheese, tell him how smart you are for solving the company's IT problems.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
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
Please read the redhat AS license. This is where the costs come from.
If they would simply put the offensive language in the SUPPORT CONTRACT where it belongs and not in the OS license where even the leaders of Open Source and linux find it offensive.
Basically, they have added things that make it look like a microsoft product license..
Please read it, it's online for a free read. It will upset and enrage you.
and It's the reason I have migrated my company away from redhat on it's servers to Mandrake.
I'm all for paying for support, I have subscribed to redhat support in the past, hell I owned stock!
But redhat is pissing on those of us that made them what they are today with their insulting license.... and that is something that doesnt sit well with me.
Offering support is one thing. Forcing me to buy it is another.
Unless someone else can tell me how to get my hands on Redhat AS without paying for the support, it's not a viable option for any enterprise that has skilled staff.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
I think the main issue is that we want to run Red Hat, but even with extra geeks, it's not going to help the security patch issue. Phone or email support isn't a big deal for people that already know how to support Linux in house.
After 12 months, you either upgrade, to the new buggy unstable version, or you stare at bugtraq all day and hope that nothing you are running comes up with a new security hole.
That's really not an option. RH is screwing up big time.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Now, I have 70 Linux servers around the country, and a steady stream of new customers. I've been installing Redhat 8.0 on new deployments because 9.0 doesn't work well with our application. So, we've everything from 7.0 through 8.0 in the field. Over the past few months, Redhat dropped up2date support and patches for Redhat 7 and 7.1. I feel guilty installing 8.0 on new boxes because I know support for it will be dropped at the end of the year.
I don't wish to buy into Redhat AS or ES because I don't understand what I'm paying for. *I'm* the Redhat support. I just need something that will receive patches and support for more than one year. The 5 year lifespan of the ES versions is nice, but I've NEVER called Redhat for support. I don't plan to.
I build the kernels for each of the servers. I use vanilla kernel.org source with XFS. We sell 2, 4 and 8-way servers. Am I missing out on anything from the "optimized" Redhat Advanced Server kernels? What are other people in this situation doing?
I think it's confusing because we initially chose Redhat for the accountability aspect of having a corporation behind the distro. Now, I'm not sure who they're targeting. I would imagine that most firms that select Redhat Advanced server and are willing to pay the price (>$1000/license) would have a staff talented enough to support it. So why the mandatory support costs from Redhat?
Edmund White
http://flickr.com/ewwhite
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
The catch; using a commercial piece of software in the mix. In our case, a certain database. Being closed-source and totally non-self-servicable in case of serious problems or bugs, it is imperative to have a support contract for the commercial software. Almost all the RDBMS vendors have now altered/clarified their support policy: they will *not* honor a paid support agreement if you are running the free version of Red Hat underneath their software.
Why this policy exists is a question I will let somebody else speculate about...
There is exactly one major RDBMS vendor I could find that will officially support its software running on the free version of Red Hat (as of April 2003, at least), and that vendor is IBM with their DB/2 product.
Unfortunately, we were too time-constrained to port our system to DB/2, so in the end we caved and paid for Red Hat Enterprise so we could get RDBMS support on our existing platform. To this day we have not called Red Hat tech support once and don't expect to do so, ever. The thousands of dollars we paid covered the 3 minutes of effort the sales guy put in over the phone. Not a bad deal for Red Hat. If I were starting from scratch, knowing about the new support policies from the RDBMS vendors, I would have done the project using DB/2. PostgreSQL would have been an even better choice, except our project required real-time database replication, and PostgreSQL is just now getting to the point where that works well enough.
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 run a small computer consulting company, one thing I usually do is replace their linksys/dlink/netgear broadband router with a linux box. Although much smaller in scale that what you are talking about, I moved from redhat to debian for the exact same reasons you are talking about. Once RH moved to its frequent .0 releases with one-year updates, I knew I had to pick a different distro. Debian is fast, stable, and compact compared to red hat. The package system kicks major ass as well. I don't need support, the only problems I have ever run into were hardware related (or my own stoopid errors)... I will, however, say that dselect is one nasty mofo of a whatever it is... If I want a new package, I just search the debian site for it, and use apt-get. Like others have said, if the support is what you need, you will have to evaluate whether its cost-effective vs other major unix-y providers. If security updates is what you want, then there are several cheaper alternatives to red hat. Redhat needs to provide an alternative for those who don't want actual support, but do need long term updates for multiple years - otherwise, they will see their piece of the Linux pie shrink. That may be what they want, it may be a simple business decision on their part to make mo money. However, I know many, many people who are ditching red hat for the exact reason I did.
Styrofoam IS biodegradable, you're just impatient!
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 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.
At home I run the developer edition of the Oracle 9ias enterprise database as well as release 2 of the Oracle 9ias Application server. I have successfully installed to Red Hat (version 8.0 not Enterprise), Mandrake and also a Debian Distribution. At work we are running a development environment on Red Hat 8.0 and production using Solaris 8. Since we are using pure java and j2ee code our software runs flawlessly across the systems with no changes whatsoever, even considering the fact that some of the developers on the project run Windows systems on their desktops where they actually write some of the source code modules!
If you expect support from Oracle concerning an Oracle installation of any kind whatsoever on Red Hat Linux you best be using Enterprise and yes the support pricing is quite high compared to what most of us are used to running Linux over the years.
I would suggest running your most critical servers on Red Hat Enterprise and if you have supporting environments, perhaps a development or test environment, use Red Hat 8.0 (or even Debian or Mandrake) and save yourself some cash outlay in that way.
If you have the talent within your staff to self support I can attest to the fact that Oracle products run as advertised on Red Hat 7.3 and 8 (have not yet tried 9) using the install procedures Oracle outlines for use on Red Hat Enterprise, but as has already been pointed out, Oracle will not support installations with problems unless you have the Enterprise edition as your underlying Linux Distro.
The Matrix is real... but I'm only visiting!
The Matrix is real... but I'm only visiting!
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.
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.
Currently I am working with a lot of Sun kit - and their sales guys. They are absolutely thrilled with Red Hat's new pricing, becuase suddenly they are competitive again.
Consider - a small Oracle DB on a 2 processor machine. The cost of a decent 2 processor server is about $2000, and then the cost of RHAS is about $2700 as I recall. Suddenly the cost of a V240r doesn't seem that bad. We pick them up for a lot less than $4700. Of course we have a pretty good deal with Sun, and the poster may get a good deal with Redhat, but we've done the analysis, and RH does not stack up for us in this example. For me, in is interesting that we have said "no Linux", not because it is a "hacker OS" or it can't do the job - but because it is too expensive to deploy. And before anyone asks, we didn't do any TCO voodoo to prove the point!
Other things Sun have on their side:
- Scalability on the same architecture. Yep, I know 2.6 will scale, but it isn't even properly released yet. We develop on small machines (240s, 480s) and deploy on 15Ks without even thinking about it - apart from making sure that the app can use the CPUs
- Solaris - damn good OS, excellent support and an understanding of what enterprise computing is about
- Support. Judging by some of the comments here Redhat support is somewhat lacking. Having called regularly on Sun support, I can say it is quite exceptional - even when problems are not their fault, they will engage with other vendors to get a fix
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.Just a little info for you:
Postgres is one of the oldest and best supported dbms around. It doesn't have a couple of features Oracle has, but it is a highly superior product compared to most others in it's class. That's in a business setting anyways. MySQL is easy to use, relatively fast at simple operations. DB2 is nice. Good for big computers with lots of ram. That's my observation, there probably is no rhyme or reason to it. I have lots of ram, and I like DB2. It's just fun! MSSQL sucks rocks. I developed a lot of websites using MSSQL as a backend and just couldn't make it feel right. Oracle is great for big iron.
They say it's good on x86. I say Ellison is full of shit.
Here's my personal dbms preference list:
Business
DB2
Oracle
Postgres
MSSQL
MySQL
Hobby/Pleasure
MySQL
Postgres
DB2
MSSQL
Oracle(unless you are masochistic)
You can't legislate goodness. Let each to his own destiny, by will of his freely made choices.