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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.

31 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Market by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm pretty sure SuSE and Red-Hat were already in the same market.

    1. Re:Market by mirko · · 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...

      --
      Trolling using another account since 2005.
    2. 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'.

    3. Re:Market by IANAAC · · 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.
    4. Re:Market by diersing · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Very true.

      Here in lies the rub when talking about markets. There is the OS market, then there's the US OS market, it gets broken down all over the place (especially when talking about market share, like any other statistic the presenter has quite a bit of wiggle room to present their point of view).

      As a US computer junky, I can tell you that in my local CompUSA, there are only 2 boxed, retail versions of Linux. They are Red Hat and SuSE, so on some playing fields (markets) they are competing head-to-head.

      As far as a market share, and who has the most installs - I would agree that Red Hat is dominating in the US and SuSE in the EU.

      I worked in a shop that ran Dell. As part of the Dell Server Assistant install (at the time at least) you had your choice of Windows NT4, Windows 2000, and Red Hat of assisted OS installs. SuSE wasn't an option and because RH and Dell had a 'relationship', SuSE wasn't even in the game. This is why their partnership with Veritas is so important. As more hardware manufactures and software vendors certify more then just Red Hat, the consumers get more choices and as we know, competition breeds better products.

  2. Sun Plug by Davak · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I love the Sun plug found in the article:
    The new software will make it easier for Unix customers to adopt Linux, Haff said. "It makes that move from a lot of Unix systems, and from Sun in particular, easier than it was before," he said. Sun Microsystems' Solaris is the most widely used version of Unix and a prime candidate for companies that want to save costs by using Linux on less-expensive Intel-based hardware.

    However, being a Sun guy myself, I worry if this is this one more blow against Sun's unstable current position.

    Davak
  3. 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...

    3. Re:The Microsoft conspiracy angle... by Diabolical · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

      Ever stopped to consider how much money is in this segment? How important it is to have a backup solution which is secure, scalable and trustable in a million bussiness?

      The fact that Veritas bought up the backup part of Seagate's software and that they have strong ties with Windows doesn't mean that they are up to some "sly" stuff... As a matter of fact, i couldn't think of anything for that matter.

      They see an emerging market, Linux, which is needing strong products to back it up in corporate userland. Any company would immediately jump to it.

      It's not as if they never supported any other kind of OS. They have supported (and still do) Novell Netware next to Windows. Their agents are available for different Unix versions (including Linux for some time now, databases (oracle and SQL server), messaging systems (Exchange and Lotus Notes) and many other corporate tools. Many of which compete directly with MS software. Oh.. by the way, they also boast the fact that they surpassed Microsoft in supplying clustering and availability products. Not something you would expect from a MS serf would you?

  4. 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
    1. Re:RH still seem 'better for business' by terraformer · · Score: 5, Interesting
      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.

      --
      Who are you? The new #2 Who is #1? You are #617565. I am not a number, I am a free man! Muhahaha.
  5. Going for Red Hat's market?? by Cooper_007 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    At the moment I'm under the impression that SuSE parimarily targets European business whereas RedHat aims more for the US, so they're not really going for Red Hat's market. Please correct me if this is wrong.

    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
    --
    I don't need a pass to pass this pass!
    - Groo The Wanderer -

  6. support? by dphoenix · · 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 · · 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.

  7. It's about time! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:It's about time! by Znork · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Um, if you have discovered that Veritas is not very well designed why do you want it more integrated?

      Veritas is like that. Either you get to live with it or you take a hard long look at the more free replacements.

      You can live without Veritas today. I most definitely dont want it included in RedHat. The alternatives like LVM are far more worthwhile to pursue (And more in line with RedHat's tendency to prefer freely distributable software in the distribution. Which is one of the main reasons that RedHat has a far bigger marketshare than SuSE does).

  8. Veritas is bad news! by Theovon · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. 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
    2. Re:Veritas is bad news! by Tet · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Veritas uses USTAR format on tape

      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
    3. Re:Veritas is bad news! by Albanach · · Score: 3, Insightful
      The documentation doesn't tell you this, but if you choose to have quick backups, then you get very slow restores.

      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.

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

  9. As a real sysadmin by nbvb · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:As a real sysadmin by Tet · · Score: 4, Interesting
      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.

      --
      "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
    2. Re:As a real sysadmin by afabbro · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Yeah, I'm a "real" sysadmin as well. However, I haven't drunk the Veritas kool-aid ;)

      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.

      Because they are GODS who brought down REVEALED TRUTH from the MOUNTAIN OF SYSADMIN GOODNESS...

      No way/no how? Pshaw. First, Veritas VxFS and VxVM are not the only products in this space - AIX ships with volume managers and file systems that are just as nice and so do other Unices. Second, they are not terribly complicated products. All they really add is another layer of indirection. And third, there are filesystems for Linux written by IBM/SGI/other people who've been to the mountain (VM isn't quite there yet)

      BTW, Veritas system products are generally a pain because they're a third-party add-on. That is one thing I like about AIX and HP-UX - the LVM is integrated.

      The clustering product is also very, very robust.

      VCS is nice but over-priced. Again, not the only player (though one of the better ones).

      Does anyone else here know what Foundation Suite is?

      No - we are all fake sysadmins who can only play with Linux because we can't get real sysadmin jobs. Please, real sysadmin, come down from the mount and give us your wisdom.

      (For those who really don't know, FS is just VxVM and VxFS bundled together. It's also a convenient way for Veritas to say "you have to buy this before you can buy other stuff, even if you don't need it, because, like, it's the FOUNDATION, man")

      FS is an over-priced remedy for Sun's defects. It's a hidden tax on every Solaris system. It has little penetration outside of Solaris because other operating systems come with their own "full volume management solutions" (thereby leveraging value-added synergistic paradigms to provide excellent enterprise ROI).

      FS is a nice product but I do not genuflect before it.

      This is for real volume management, real disk replacement, real mirroring/striping/etc.

      Real, real, real, dammit! REAL! Not that fake stuff you fake sysadmins are doing! I'm talking my REAL stuff!

      I hate to tell you this, but there is plenty of "real" storage management done outside the Sun/Veritas world: AIX, HP-UX, mainframes, AS/400, and...gasp...Linux, sometimes without Veritas!

      Having seen different products, and knowing Veritas far more intimately than I want to, I can't say that Linux + Veritas would be my preferred combo.

      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....

      I have nothing against VxFS - a fine product. But hardly manna from heaven. A filesystem design has to be one of the most easily commoditized pieces of IT.

      Real businesses trust their data to real companies. Veritas is one of 'em.

      Yeah, I work in a "real" business and having had "real" experience with Veritas I can tell you that they are a "real" pain in the ass.

      Veritas is a sick company. Their support has nosedived and their products of late have been orders of magnitude less reliable than years ago.

      To sum up: Veritas is just a software company, not the messiah.

      --
      Advice: on VPS providers
  10. Go SuSe!! by dr.Flake · · Score: 3, Interesting



    It seems to me that a little more competition for RedHat in the server market is a good thing. The stronger (in the form of backing by large compagnies)the competition, the stronger the perception that Linux in the server room is a viable option.

    Remember that SuSe is connected to the German goal of designing a groupware server for large work-groups. Seems SuSe is making quite a line-up of products for in the basement of large compagnies.

    --
    Why are other peoples sig's always more witty ???
  11. Now to see... by Doomrat · · Score: 4, Funny

    now to see how it all pans out.

    Excrutiatingly boringly.

  12. Veritas Marketing Ideas by Joe+U · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm looking forward to SuSE using some of Veritas' brilliant marketing.

    No, you can't use the older version on that OS, you'll need to upgrade to the version that costs 10x more.

    Veritas lost all respect when they shoved a new version of Backup Exec down my throat. Version 7 refused to run on Windows 2000. It even had checks built into the installer to make sure you wouldn't run it on Windows 2000. It had more checks to make sure you couldn't fake the OS version to bypass the check.

    Guess what, after hours of tinkering, it ran, and worked. All this, just to do a remote backup of a few important shares.

  13. Veritas - Good Products - Huge Pricetag by Tenareth · · Score: 2, Interesting


    I've been using Veritas in my shop for over 6 years, and I have to say, the Foundation suite is a great product. However, the pricetag has been going through the roof over the past 3 years. The core prices are going up, and they keep seperating out components and then selling them as "add-ons".

    Veritas NetBackup still isn't a great system, it's miles behind what OmniBack II from HP does, unfortunately HP Never ported the Cell Server to anything besides HP.

    While it might not be so bad if I spend $40,000 on a Filesystem when I spent $1.5Mil on the server, I don't think someone spending $50,000 for a server will want to spend $20,000 on the VM & FS.

    --
    This sig is the express property of someone.
  14. Distro-specific by phorm · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I think that there's a danger in any particular distribution of linux gaining too much market, particularly the more commercial ones. Commercial-driver-development has been quite telling in the area of distro-preference, with RedHat (and actually, quite often SuSe already) being the common distros supported by hardware vendors?

    What does that mean to me? A lot of hardware comes touted as "supports linux," but when you really get down to it and read the accompanying docs, it means "supports RedHat" or "supports SuSe" and not any others without large amount of hassle. Because of this, it just gets harder for other distros to gain power or popularity in the market, because of the old cycle (and where have we heard this before): users won't use it 'cause it doesn't work (well/easily) on their hardware. Vendors won't fully support it until the user-base increases.

    I'd like to see SuSe trim the edges off RedHat a bit, and hopefully some of the distros catch up as well (Debian, or debian-based such as knoppix/morphix). If there were at least a few more major players in the linux market, perhaps we might see more source or at least non-packager-specific (RPM) drivers/etc.

  15. Not interested by harlows_monkeys · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Until they make YaST GPL, I'm not interested. The YaST license does not meet the FSF defition of "free", nor does it meet the Open Source Initiative's defintion of an open source license.

    Redhat GPL's their stuff. I can go to dozens of companies and buy cheap copies of Redhat, with only the name changed since Redhat does protect their name. Can't do that with SuSE.