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.

Comments

Veritas is bad news!

[Theovon]

Where I work, we've had some rather unpleasant experiences with Veritas. I'm not the sysadmin, so I don't have all the details. In any event, we had a hardware failure, resulting in the need for a full restore from tape. Here are some of the problems we encountered with Veritas:

- The documentation doesn't tell you this, but if you choose to have quick backups, then you get very slow restores.
- Our restore rate was about 1 megabyte per second.
- 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.
- 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.
- Veritas support is prohibitively expensive.
- We were down for a week because of this horrible software.

Re:As a real sysadmin

[Tet]

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.

Of course there is. Not only is there a way, it's being done right now. Witness the recent addition of extents to ext3, and the (newly revived, IIRC) tux2 phase tree filesystem. See also the huge advances that have been made in the Linux LVM. Yes, Veritas is ahead of the pack at the moment. But they're catching up every day, and Veritas don't have a sustainable product offering[1] in the long term, in the same way that Sun is starting to feel the pinch from Linux. Yes, the low end tends to be laughed at by the high end players. But over time, the low end gradually acquires more and more features until it's on a par with the mid range and eventually high end. Elements within Veritas already know this, but whether management do is another matter entirely.

[1] Veritas have three main products: Foundation Suite (that is, VxFS and VxVM), clustering and backups. Of those, the first two are definitely under mid term threat from free alternatives.

Re:RH still seem 'better for business'

[terraformer]

RH still seem 'better for business'

Really? I got an email from red hat threatening to take me to collection for non payment. I had not even gotten one other communication, snail or email, from them preceeding this (I check my junk mail and save every piece of it, in part, for this very reason). I call up and uncharacteristically don't blow my top but ask if they have been having billing issues. Turns out that I did owe them money, a cc had expired on an auto rebill, but he did acknowledge that I did not know about it and that they had taken their system offline for over two months (for an upgrade... hmmm) and the system just picked up from where it believed it should be at that point and not from where it had left off. Businesses don't need crap like that.

I am really glad to have an alternative to RH in this space. Linux is about alternatives and there have not been viable ones for some time in the Business space in linux. This should help and I can assure you in a year when I plan on upgrading, I will be checking out SuSe.