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SuSE Going For Red Hat's Market

Posted by Hemos on 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.

6 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. The Microsoft conspiracy angle... by jkrise · · 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.

    --
    If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
    1. Re:The Microsoft conspiracy angle... by OP_Boot · · 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 · · 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...

  2. RH still seem 'better for business' by hughk · · 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.

    --
    See my journal, I write things there
  3. Re:Market by diersing · · 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'.

  4. Re:Veritas is bad news! by larien · · 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