Dell Calls For Red Hat To Lower Prices

VaultX points to an article on CNET (linked below), writing "According to Dell, Red Hat needs to lower pricing. 'We believe Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, for the small and medium-sized business market, was out of the price range of these customers.' With Dell's strong presence in the Linux server market, Red Hat may want to listen."

Comments

ANONYMOUS COWARD CALLS FOR FERRARI TO LOWER PRICES

[Anonymous Coward]

'We believe the Ferrari F430 Spider, for the small and medium-sized automotive market, was out of the price range of Mr. Coward.' With Coward's strong presence in the local Ferrari dealership, Ferrari SpA may want to listen.

Agree

[mjmartin_uk]

I completely agree with Dell's views on RHEL's overpricing. I bought a Dell PowerEdge server for a small business back in August but Red Hat's Enterprise Linux was overpriced and we felt uncomfortable buying a subscription at the rates we were offered from Dell. Instead I recommend we choose Suse's offereing which was a far more viable option for the company. I can see why Dell went for Novell a month or two back. Let's not beat about the bush though, it could be construed that Dell spoke to Novell so they are now in a better bargainig position with Red Hat.

Don't Write Home About RH Support

[bill_mcgonigle]

Speaking of Redhat support how is it? I've used Redhat Enterprise Server before, but never had a reason to call their tech support line. Only reason I reccomended it to the client was that he wanted something that had support. Which of course he never used either(Just called me).

That describes my situation six months ago exactly. Then I had a problem with up2date.

So I called RedHat for the first time in the decade I've been using it. I found out:

• They won't help you if this is an upgrade install. They offer to help you if you reformat your drive and install fresh. (note: their installer leaves multiple redhat-release RPM's installed. rpm -q, rpm --erase to get up2date working)
  
• If you have 3rd party RPM's installed that may be an unsupported configuration
  
• They won't help you if they don't like your hardware. In this case I was redoing a RedHat 8 server with a functional firewire disk array. Had to install the kernel-unsupported package to get that working

I challenged them that there was no indication on their website that RedHat Linux upgrades were unsupported (they always were in the past so it's not unreasonable to assume they still would be) and they conceded the point and offered to get a notice up within a week, but weren't any more helpful.

So, what kind of support are you getting for that money? It's alot like Microsoft support. Completely useless so a waste of money by definition.

It's too bad - I was 3 licenses into a 30+ server effort over multiple clients, and that's as far as I got. There's a huge base of installed RedHat Linux users they're completely ignoring. I want to help pay Alan Cox's salary, but they don't make it feasible for me.

Instead of throwing good money after bad, I ditched it and put Fedora Core 2 on. Yeah, I'm out $300 but yum will set you free. Plus firewire works perfectly in the current kernel releases.

Re:Don't Write Home About RH Support

[killjoe]

Welcome to the enterprise my friend.

The purpose of enterprise support is not to fix your problem it's to convince your CIO to buy the product. It's to make sure the "is supported" box is checked off.

I have had the exact same or worse story from every majow vendor in the IT world. MS, Netapp, HP, Veritas, Dell and Apple. Call them up and all of a sudden you find out you paid for nothing. They all find an excuse not to help you. I even had a netapp guy say "don't call us anymore" despite the fact that our company had paid for top level support.

My experience is that the only people who support you are small local vendors. They will camp out at your place if they have to. Enterprise vendors just take your money and laugh.

Re:They could be lower but not by much

[iwan-nl]

Sun sucks.

How much crack does one need to smoke in order to mod parent Interesting?

"Wow, he thinks Sun sucks! How interesting! Especially since the article has *absolutely nothing* to do with Sun! If only I had more mod points i'd mod this guy Insightfull too! w00t!"