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SuSE Going For Red Hat's Market
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.
I'm pretty sure SuSE and Red-Hat were already in the same market.
However, being a Sun guy myself, I worry if this is this one more blow against Sun's unstable current position.
Davak
Aside from this, Red Hat and Suse are competitors. Of course Suse is going for Red Hat's market and you can rest assured that Red Hat is trying very hard to react in kind.
Maybe someone should change the headline to "Suse signs a deal with Veritas"?
Cooper
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I don't need a pass to pass this pass!
- Groo The Wanderer -
All I can say is: it's about time.
I'm currently going through the pain of doing a Veritas
install on RH Server, and let me tell you I have some
*serious* reservations about this product. It is quite clear
that the Veritas stuff is not designed well at all. As much as
I'm a RH bigot, I'll drop them in a minute if this stuff runs
well on SuSE.
For example, in trying to bring up the Veritas stuff for what
will be a NAS head, Veritas requires two primary
partitions! Extended just won't work. Hello? This is an
incredibly basic and fundamental screwup, and it is simple
to fix. What did they do - ship the engineering off to India?
Then there are other issues to consider. Most notably NFS
performance. NFS on Linux just sucks in comparison to
Solaris. It is way too slow, and yes, I've done the various tuning bits. It looks like we'll have to dig into the source to
fix this; assuming we just don't drop RH altogether and go
back to Solaris.
So I'm very pleased to see Veritas and SuSE team up. If
only RH would join in. Perhaps something will be working
sufficiently for a real IT department in about a year. It sure
isn't there now.
As a real sysadmin (I don't play one on TV, I do the real thing), let me just say that this is most definitely a Good Thing (tm) for SuSE.
There's no way, no how that they could write a volume manager or filesystem product that's even in the same league with VxFS and VxVM.
The clustering product is also very, very robust. It's a simple, clean design, yet very powerful if you know how to take advantage of it. A welcome breath of fresh air after Sun Cluster 2.x and even 3.x (What dogs!)
Does anyone else here know what Foundation Suite is? It provides a full volume management solution; no, this isn't so you can "mount your wind00z mp3z" or stuff like that. This is for real volume management, real disk replacement, real mirroring/striping/etc.
And VxFS is probably the most kick-ass filesystem I've ever used. The journaling alone is just fantastic, and the speed.... damn, it's fast. Even better, using Quick I/O....
Good for SuSE! About damned time Linux gained "real" volume management, filesystems & clustering.
Real businesses trust their data to real companies. Veritas is one of 'em.
This is only true for trivial cases (single machine backup). In the real world, multiple machines back up to a central server concurrently. When that happens, Veritas uses it's own interleaved format on tape, which isn't readable with tar.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
So they offered Quick Backups as an option rather than as default and you didn't think there must be some compromise? Don't you think that if quick backups were available without compromise, it would happen as standard?
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.
Given the number of enterprise organisations using Veritas, this sounds a lot like a problem with your setup. Have you spoken to their technical support team? Someone's probably had similar problems before. They can probably identify the problem and help you fix it.
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.
You bought proprietary software, and it uses a proporietary format. Are you surprised? Of course you could always download your enterprise class backup solution from freshmeat. You buy enterprise software because of the support, so call up tech support, explain your problem. Ask them if they have a way of identifying what was backed up and what wasn't.
Veritas support is prohibitively expensive.
Yes, qualified technical experts tend to be. This is enterprise support, not a droid that can get by telling you to reinstall Win9x.
We were down for a week because of this horrible software.
No, you were down for a week because your SysAdmin clearly hadn't tested the company's disaster recovery plan before disaster finally hit. If you don't test your backup solution before you need it you can be 99% sure it'll fail when you do.