Heavy-Duty System Administration Utilities?

leandrod asks: "I am in the process of helping a small software company define the infrastructure for their major client's new system. It is a big country, and it is a medium-sized client planning on going big. We are planning to standardize on Debian GNU/Linux. I am aware I can have IBM Tivoli Maestro for GNU/Linux for production scheduling, and BEA's Tuxedo TP monitor, but they are unsupported under Debian. I am also aware of one or two free TP monitors, but they are either incipient or stagnating. I couldn't find a production scheduler. I know I can do lots with the standard tools, but keep in mind I am targeting a transaction-processing bureau for a big operation with hundreds of thousands of terminals and millions of users, something like a poor man's Wal-Mart, or even Visa. Are there vendors out there willing to support Debian or just GNU/Linux in general? If not, are there free software projects that accomplish the same thing?"

Comments

Think long-term stability...

[duffbeer703]

Standardizing on Debian is a really lousy idea. At some point, your customer is likely to need or want commercial software (esp RDBMS), and they will find that Debian is simply not supported by any commercial software vendor. (To be honest, most non-Linux geeks have never heard of Debian)

Go with Red Hat or Suse. You might find that going with a more stable (from a support POV) Unix OS like Solaris may be a good choice for certain systems as well. The support costs are real, but a Tivoli Management environment would cost a helluva lot more if the IBM salesfolk talk your client into it.

If you in a signifigant transaction processing business, the money will come - spend the money now to start a Maestro or Tuxedo system so you don't need to waste valuable time (and lose business) later.

I also hate to say this a longtime Debian fan... but the major commercial distros aren't going anywhere. RedHat and Suse have built brands and have major money & support flowing in from corps like IBM & HP. Can the same be said for Debian, whose stable release is starting to get a little crusty?

Remember to ask yourself what you & your client needs and what is best for the business. Keep the tech-geek religious wars on Slashdot!

WTF?

[smoon]

Part 1: Rant (stay tuned for part 2)
Why debian? Don't get me wrong -- debian is great for a lot of things, but ... sheesh. Are you making a political statement or trying to support an enterprise need?

Focus on the tools you need _first_ and the OS they run on second. Getting a great OS with no tools is a lousy place to be, especially after a few months when the client has refused to pay some bills because things aren't working and you have to explain at a meeting between their CEO/CFO/VP of whatever and your CEO/VP/whatever exactly why not, and that to fix it they need to invest $X more in some other platform along with $Y to migrate.

Part 2: Some ideas
The TP monitor (e.g. CICS) is frequently done now in a database, so use begin trans, commit trans or rollback trans, and you've got transactions. At least until your database or number of users gets too big. Postgres is a good open-source database that has commercial support options and supports transactions. There are several others, sapdb I think is one. Not sure if mysql supports transactions or not. This is an area where a commercial app (DB2, Sybase, Oracle) may be a worthwile investment, especially if you get into clustering or HA hardware setups.

Many people use the J2EE framework. In open source that pretty much means jboss. Runs great on linux and you get to deploy lots of apache servers and use buzzwords like 'entity bean' and 'xml'.

What in the h*ll do you need to do schedule-wise that can't be done in anacron and some simple shell-scripting? There is a reason there aren't really any open source schedulers: cron and anacron are ubiquitous and do what they do extrememly well.

Sad reality is multiplatformic

[korpiq]

IT is infrastructure for companies. It is not (arguably ever) their essential business. Their essential business is a combination of management, sales, accounting, production and assorted support procedures for the aforementioned as well as for their clients. Each stream of the gigantic process that is the company has specific tool requirements. I can not see a sustainable model wherein an IT department (outsourced or not) could keep up to its clients' necessities from any monocultural standpoint. I'd rather prepare to separate each task to a platform that best supports it, then define these separations and make my staff follow the definitions, of course redefining where need arises.

Now as for small companies that cannot afford a multitude of servers, I'd offer a single solution that best fulfills most of their needs and that I would like to keep up and polished for them myself... A debian.

Why Not Redhat Linux Enterprise?

[osewa77]

Hi,

Since Debian is not supported and Redhat Linux probably is, why have you decided to standardize on Debian? It beats me!

Regards,
Seun Osewa

Talk to IBM sales

[metamatic]

As far as IBM is concerned, money talks. If you are planning a 100,000 seat Debian deployment and want IBM tools, contact IBM sales and tell them. If enough people ask, maybe Debian will become a supported platform.

Plenty of us inside IBM would like to see some free Linux distributions supported, but the company makes its decisions based on commercial pressures, not ideology, and right now not enough people want to run their enterprise on Debian, Gentoo or any other free (beer) Linux.