Using Debian in Commercial Environments?

sydb asks: "I am currently persuading my employer to try out Linux. We are heavily dependent on IBM software technologies just now, and it's a very conservative operations organization. As a challenge, I am trying to persuade them to use my preferred distro but there are hurdles: IBM doesn't officially support Debian as a platform, though I have anecdotal evidence that most of it can be persuaded to work (with alien etc). Does Slashdot have experience shoe-horning Debian into this kind of scenario? Most importantly, how have things gone getting IBM support? My rationale for pushing Debian boils down to its vast array of packages available to apt-get, easy upgrades, apt-get itself, and the overall quality and consistency of the system."

Comments

Go HP!

[Schreckgestalt]

Go HP, they support Debian.

PS: No, I am not an HP employee.

IBM has helped us out...

[Howard Beale]

We're running Debian on several xSeries systems. At first, we were having problems with server lockups. While it turned out to be a problem with the XFS file system, IBM supported us by swapping out just about the entire server.

They won't support the software, but they will support their hardware running it.

Re:Conservative and don't like Debian?

[sydb]

We don't have a working system, this is a new system for a particular job.

The only IBM software we need to use in "production" is a DB2 client and probably a TSM agent. We could avoid the TSM agent.

We would probably want to run WebSphere on it for testing purposes - testing of scripts before they reach the environments our developers use.

My concerns are more about persuading management that an "unsupported" distribution could be a goer, and what I expect to be a small number if contacts with IBM support.

So I understand your thinking, but in this case it's misplaced.