Red Hat Not Seeing Microsoft, Ubuntu as Threats

Ian Price writes "Red Hat is shrugging off Microsoft's entry into the cluster computing space after Microsoft announced that it has completed the code for its Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 targeting high-performance computing. From the article: 'Scott Crenshaw, general manager of enterprise Linux platform at Red Hat, dismissed Microsoft's entry into cluster computing. "They're playing catch-up," he said. "Linux is often associated with high-performance computing, but Windows has never achieved that on a large scale."' Crenshaw also commented with respect to Ubuntu: 'Their user base is still small, so we're not seeing the impact of it [Ubuntu] so far.'"

Comments

Famous last words

[HeavensBlade23]

I think Netscape was quoted as saying something similar shortly before Internet Explorer utterly destroyed their marketshare. If nothing else, don't underestimate Microsoft's ability to leverage their monopoly into new markets.

Just like MS

[Umbral Blot]

'Their user base is still small, so we're not seeing the impact of it [Ubuntu] so far.'

I am sure Microsoft said the same thing about Red Hat. Pride goes before a fall Red Hat.

Re:Just like MS

[afaik_ianal]

Mind you, the article title is a bit misleading. They said they are not seeing the impact of Ubuntu yet. They didn't say that they do not see them as threats.

Red Hat doesn't need to do much.

[tapo]

I remember when tech websites were clamoring over the latest Fedora release as much as they're clamoring over Ubuntu now. Red Hat almost got it right, except for one thing.

Fix your package manager!

I am sick of downloading packages from weird websites, version conflicts, and typing this stupid and overly long command into the shell over and over, hoping - nay, praying - that RPM won't spit out another conflict error this time. YUM seems tacked on, and I've never gotten it to work properly.

I switched to Ubuntu, even though it had less polish and was so deep in development, simply because application management actually worked, and things were in a logical order (supported, unsupported, universe, multiverse).

Maybe it's not practical, maybe I'm talking out of my ass having not used a Red Hat operating system since Fedora Core 3, but it's the only thing that prevents me from using Fedora at home or on a server, and the only thing that prevents me from recommending it to friends.

Re:Red Hat doesn't need to do much.

[cowbutt]

That's exactly it.

Fedora's catching up fast, but Debian and Gentoo are still in the lead with respect to the number of applications available within their main package repositories. That's why their package management tools appear to work better - it's actually down to all the hard work that's been put in by the package maintainers though; the tools are nothing special (rpm provides equal or better functionality to dpkgs and ebuilds, and apt is available for rpm as well as yum).

The trouble is that the lesser number of packages for Fedora/RH encourages newbie and intermediate users to indiscriminately install packages from random places, with the expected results. If, however, you pick a handful of co-operative package repositories (e.g. dag + rpmforge only, or fedora extras + livna only, or ATrpms only), things work out pretty well. For packages that aren't available, it's best to learn to roll your own, either by porting packages from other versions/distros, or upgrading existing packages, or from scratch.

Re:Red Hat doesn't need to do much.

[joe 155]

well, the article isn't really about this, but as a fedora user I feel like I should at least counter some of your claims:

YUM works very well in FC5, it has made keeping software up to date really easy, far more than on windows. everything does it pretty much strait away; so for me it's great. They do have a GUI one aswell, but that doesn't seem to be as fast and I like the information... so run it from the command line

You also don't need to look through random websites, you already get 3 repositories with the distro, but it's really easy to add another (I've got livna) in there. These will contain pretty much all the software you could ever want to find

you really should consider trying fedora again. it's such a good little OS. anyway, if you do you should go to http://www.fedorafaq.org/ it contains a load of helpful information about how to get everything going. Also, it's not fedora's fault that some proprietary stuff doesn't work out of the box - it's free speech and wants to stay that way - we really should be praising them for this, not condeming them because it might take a little more effort to get some things working. Anyway, give it a go.

Microsoft has been into clustering for years.

[Anonymous Coward]

Years and years and years.

They've had several clusters into the Top500 several times.

A couple examples are a NSCA self-made cluster of NT machines that reached rank 207 in June 2000 top500 list. It consisted of 256-processor production supercluster, which consists of 128 Hewlett-Packard machines with dual 550-MHz Intel Pentium III Xeon processors.

These early efforts were typified by statements like:
"Couldn't barely get the benchmark done before the entire cluster would go done"
"If one node failed the entire cluster would go down"

And stuff like that.

That's the first time NT posted a top500 standing. They had earlier efforts going back several years.

About every single top500 list since then had a Microsoft-based cluster somewere.. Until recently.

Now Linux, which started gaining ground about the same time that Microsoft started with clustering research, now dominates the top500 list.

Good luck on that one, MS. I also like how their P.R. stuff always makes it sound like Microsoft just started getting into clustering.

Except that

[DrYak]

This time RedHat != Linux.

If RH starts loosing market share, it'll more likely be to other Linux distributor or other opensource os, like suse,ubuntu,debian,openbsd,etc.
It's not the whole Linux community of developppers ingoring they adversaries, it's only *a* specific solution vendor.
You can kill distribution, but it's much harder to kill Linux as a whole.

Netscape Navigator almost disappeared back then, because it depended on a sinle company and that company failed to notice the threat and lost market shares. ...

That and I'm sure Microsoft will manage to build something that sucks in terms of scaliability, reliability and above all : possibility of customisation and reasonnable per-CPU license price.
Some labs build huge clusters, this new Windows flavor must cost less than the "Windows Beginners Edition [a.k.a. 3rd world edition]" (*) and provide impeccable service, otherwise it can't compete with opensource softwares.

Plus, unlike in the browser case, Microsoft can't try to leverage its desktop OS monopoly : you can bundle a browser on a widely deployed OS, but you can't "bundle a cluster" inside the OS - that sentence doesn't make sense.
Clusters are mostly custom build to specific needs, by people who have enough technical knowledge to assemble whatever they need. Windows Cluster-flavor must attract them by its qualities, not because laziness drives them to choose whatever option came with the box...

(*): ...hum... wonder if this windows flavor could be subverted as an even cheaper Windows to be installed on desktops. (I don't mind missing all "wonderful" features available in other flavors like the ActiveX-bugged IE or the DRM-laden Media Player. Just want a kernel that is compatible with games. I'll fix the gaps with OSS and stick to linux for the rest)