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

Market

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Sun Plug

[Davak]

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

The Microsoft conspiracy angle...

[jkrise]

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.

RH still seem 'better for business'

[hughk]

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.

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.

Going for Red Hat's market??

[Cooper_007]

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 -

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.

As a real sysadmin

[nbvb]

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.

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.

Now to see...

[Doomrat]

now to see how it all pans out.

Excrutiatingly boringly.