SuSE Going For Red Hat's Market

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SuSE Going For Red Hat's Market

Posted by Hemos on Monday October 27, 2003 @01:48AM from the gunning-for-the-top-dog dept.

IAEBG writes "SuSE Linux has enlisted the backing of server-software maker Veritas, an important step in supporting the needs of business computing and keeping up with top Linux seller Red Hat. Check out the article on News.com." Interesting step - now to see how it all pans out.

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Re:Market by mirko · 2003-10-27 01:54 · Score: 2, Informative

"United" Linux I do not think so :
The four partner companies in UnitedLinux LLC - Conectiva, the SCO Group, SuSE Linux and Turbolinux -- continue to support products powered by UnitedLinux Version 1.0 and customers deploying these products.
No mention about Red Hat...

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Trolling using another account since 2005.
The Microsoft conspiracy angle... by jkrise · 2003-10-27 01:59 · Score: 4, Informative

I remember that Veritas was one of the few companies that licensed MS filesystem and protocols. In fact, after Seagate, I think Veritas took over Backup Exec and the XP backup s/w.

Now, what advantage does tying up with Veritas give a Linux distro firm? Backups? That should be a very minor market segment, even among Corporate users.

Methinks, there's something sly going on over here.

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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
1. Re:The Microsoft conspiracy angle... by OP_Boot · 2003-10-27 02:07 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  Yes, they bought Backup Exec (and the non-crystal bits of Seagate Software). Veritas wrote Disk Manager for Win2K. They also wrote a replacement for NTFS that never saw the light of day. But don't forget that they built themselves on filesystems, volume management and clustering for unix boxen.
2. Re:The Microsoft conspiracy angle... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-10-27 02:12 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  I work closely with Veritas (I design storage systems) and I can tell you that there is no bias at Veritas towards any specific operating system. They have created several parts of w2k / XP, but they also supply file systems for most of the *NIX systems.
  
  Also backup software (netbackup and backup exec) are one of the most important products that you can run in an enterprise network. Not trivial as you seem to suggest...
RH still seem 'better for business' by hughk · 2003-10-27 02:07 · Score: 4, Informative

Red Hat's enterprise server products have had good coverage and in general, it is seen as being better for business customers. I guess this is mostly because of their press coverage in the English speaking world. However, Suse is popular in Europe, particularly in Germany and this is an important step for them to be able to offer high-end solutions to the PHBs.
Incidentally, Linuxworld Frankfurt is colocated with the European Banking World expo and conference. A ticket for one gets you into to the other. The Bankfest, is for serious PHBs and Linuxworld is offering a day on Linux in finance to attract "Cross-interest".
In other news, Sun's shares (SUNW) were slighlty down. Having Veritas supporting both RH and Suse isn't good news for them.

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Re:Market by diersing · 2003-10-27 02:11 · Score: 3, Informative

I think you have a gross conceptual error.

Market - as in doing business in the same arena (the server/enterprise OS market in this example) SuSE and Red Hat are certainely competitors there.

UnitedLinux was a marketing strategy to consolidate the distribution to battle the 'I can't run linux because I'm not sure which ones are good or which ones will be around' argument.

I think this is a great deal for SuSE. For those Windows shops that may want to delve into the Linux world now at least have a choice of distros if they are a partner of Veritas'.
support? by dphoenix · 2003-10-27 02:15 · Score: 2, Informative

What's really going to matter to businesses is support. With Red Hat, they know they're getting a trusted support contract. That's the primary reason most businesses choose Red Hat.
1. Re:support? by Wudbaer · 2003-10-27 02:22 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  While this is true for the US, at least in Germany (at most likely also in other European countries) SuSE has a strong support and consulting presence.
  
  It's not accidential that the Munich Linux project as well as other larger Linux migration projects are backed by SuSE among others like IBM. Also in Germany large vendors like IBM or Fujitsu-Siemens work closely with SuSE. While Redhat still has a strong presence in Germany, SuSE is a premium choice for large Linux projects over here.
Re:Veritas is bad news! by larien · 2003-10-27 02:36 · Score: 3, Informative

I don't know about your other issues, but as far as I'm aware, Veritas uses USTAR format on tape; from http://www.data-storage.info/product.asp?pid=68:
Non-proprietary tape format provides the ability to create .tar compatible tapes
Re:Veritas is bad news! by Allasard · 2003-10-27 02:51 · Score: 2, Informative

I am a sysadmin....
- The documentation doesn't tell you this, but if you choose to have quick backups,then you get very slow restores.
Um, I just flipped through the manual for about 15 seconds and found at least one example: "However, when you use multiplexing, expected reduced performance on restores...."
- Our restore rate was about 1 megabyte per second.
That sounds like a network or hardware or architecture bottleneck. Software has nothing to do with the tape speed writing to the disk you're restoring to.
- Veritas would crash after restoring only a few gigabytes, requiring us to restart where we left off, only for it to crash again after a few gigabytes. This resulted in a few gaps in the restore.
Never saw that. Just restored a 100Gig Filesystem last week.
- Veritas uses some proprietary format on tape, making it impossible for us to get at the data some other way so that we could write scripts to check what was restored and what was not.
They use GNU tar, I think. You're only problem is finding which file number on the tape your data is. (You might not be able to restore a multiplexed image by hand) I've recently restored some files on a tape with "tar" I didn't want to import from another backup server.
- Veritas support is prohibitively expensive.
Well, they are. :) But sometimes you get what you pay for.
- We were down for a week because of this horrible software.
"Tis a poor workman who blames his tools."
That's not to say Netbackup is perfect, it's not. But, you're being kind of unfair blaming a product. Backup speeds are always a tradeoff in respect to restores.
Re:Market by IANAAC · 2003-10-27 02:53 · Score: 2, Informative

Market - as in doing business in the same arena (the server/enterprise OS market in this example) SuSE and Red Hat are certainely competitors there.

In the US, at least, SuSE and RH are most definitely NOT in the same market. When it comes to marketing toward businesses and enterprise, RH pretty much owns the market. You don't find ads (or anything else, for that matter) from SuSE targeting businesses. SuSE is, however, quite popular outside that market. I don't know about Europe, but I suspect that the positions are reversed there, with SuSE having the lead.