A CIO's View of SUSE's Enterprise Viability

onehitwonder writes "As part of an ongoing quest to find a viable alternative to the Microsoft desktop in the enterprise, well-known healthcare CIO John Halamka spent a month using Novell SUSE 10 as his sole operating system. His conclusion? It's good enough for the enterprise. In Windows vs. Linux vs. OS X: CIO John Halamka Tests SUSE, he explains how SUSE stacks up against RHEL, Fedora, XP and OS X (in a life-critical business environment), and which issues should influence an enterprise-class organization to adopt it."

Comments

Now That's a Good Viewpoint

[nz17]

We've had everyone from HardOCP to grandmas post their opinion on the "best desktop system" issue, but I think someone with not only workers and an enterprise on the line, but the life-and-death of people on his hands, is really going to give an honest opinion. He doesn't want deaths on his hands either directly or from his recommendations. I think everyone reading this post should give the article at least a cursory glance before jumping to their own opinions.

Re:Now That's a Good Viewpoint

[gweihir]

It's time to thin the herd.

I don't agree. The differences are of an other type than the ones between, e.g., versions of Windows. First thing is that the "look and feel" is really not tied to the distribution. Whether I run fvwm2 on top of Suse, RedHat, Debian, etc. does not matter much for its look and feel. That is almost completey determined by my .fvwm2rc file. Second thing is that hardware support (i.e. kernel) is again not tied to the distribution. I am running Debain with a stock kernel.org kernel with my own config. I did the same before with Suse. Not a problem. Third thing is that the rest of the OS is again not tied to the distro. Practically everything can be changed or customized. Same is true for the applications. Which distro I run an application on makes very little difference. The most difference makes the window-manager, but that is an application in itself and not distribution specific.

The thing that does matter is support and updates. These can be very different from distro to distro. This is also the point that becomes very important in professional adoption. Of course Linux has all the advantages here, since MS support is really very, very bad. For Linux you not only can get better support. You can have your own people do it on every level. Or buy the support from a lot of different poeple, with just the quality level you need. And if one support offer cannot cut it, moving to another one is a very real option.

And if you do not use the vendor-support, the distribution becomes even less important. Of course a large organization will need to hier a few Linux gurus in a move to Linux. But the potential gains are staggering.

Re:Now That's a Good Viewpoint

[ozmanjusri]

It's time to thin the herd.

So don't use the bad distros, and do support the good ones.

It's called "competition" and while it's been absent from the OS space for a long time, it's what drives innovation in capitalist economies.

Look, this dumb meme gets trotted out at just about every discussion of Linux. It's dumb because:

• Linux is free. That means anyone can make their own distro. Even if you were right (which you're not), there's bugger-all you can do about it.
• Having plenty of competing distros encourages distributors to keep improving their versions.
• Because of the copyleft provisions of the GPL, improvements in one distro can be adopted by all other distros. That means if one distributor fails (like Corel did), their efforts are not lost to the community
• Having specialised versions of Linux filling dozens of different niches means it's that much harder for an aggressive and predatory competitor to "fucking kill" all of them.

It's great that SuSe is able to fill the corporate desktop niche, but I'd still prefer to use Sabayon for gaming, Puppy on my pen drive, SME on a small server, Debian on a big one, Ophcrack for rescuing Windows users who've forgotten passwords, etc, etc, etc.

There's plenty more reasons this meme is dumb and dangerous. Try thinking of a few yourself, preferably before posting next time.

Re:Now That's a Good Viewpoint

[Jane_Dozey]

In a corporate environment one enterprise distro will be used and the same software loaded onto each desktop. That means no problems with directory structures, libs, DE's or really much else. Everyone in the company will be using the same thing, much like they are with windows (can you really see the IT dept letting users choose between windows versions?).

The company doesn't care about whether there's a "linux" or not. They're using RHEL/SuSE/whatever not this mysterious "Linux". I think you'll find a whole lot of "Linux people" disagreeing with you there. Every single Linux admin I've ever met has used lots of different distros and knows the quirks of each one. The company will hire people who can do the job on the system used, not those who don't.

A *good* Linux admin will know whether they can use the system or not and apply for jobs accordingly. A bad admin might try and wing it but hey, they're a bad admin and should never had been hired in the first place.

At the enterprise level there are very few options. I can currently think of 2 off the top of my head: RHEL and SuSE. These are what companies will be using and these are what they will be advertising jobs for, so no, at the enterprise level multiple versions really aren't such a problem.
But what if more enterprise distros appear? I still don't see a problem. The IT market has a habit of having it's top 2 or 3 choices and a multitude of alternatives. IT managers will be using the top 2 or 3 and pretty much ignoring everything else unless they get good enough to topple one of the current leaders, in which case there's still only 2 or 3.

It's only really when you get down to individuals and their home desktops that it becomes more difficult...

Re:Now That's a Good Viewpoint

[Ajehals]

So are companies currently running a single windows flavour on everything? No they may run XP on their desktops (Probably a few 2K, NT or 98 boxes left for some application that doesn't like XP), Vista on some of the laptops (Sales need the latest gizmo's). Windows 2k or 2k3 server (Or more likely a mixture) on their internal servers (if they are a windows shop). A *nix on their web servers, whatever OS is in their managed routers (with its own management applications), PalmOS on their PDA's, Symbian on their Phones, Mac OS on their Graphic designers Powebooks.. Its hardly a monoculture.

With Linux you could get closer though, you could be running Dabian on all your desktops, Laptops and servers, And then Debian derivatives on your routers (well maybe...), PDA's and Phones... I haven't seen Linux specifically for switches but it may get there... - you could really get to the point where our entire IT infrastructure is based on the same code base, but still role specific (i.e. you are not going tobe running KDE on your servers or your PDA's - the kernel or each type of device is going to be different).

So as an enterprise you could have a license free (and therefore license cost free - no extra software costs associated with growth...) environment, total compatibility between everything (Your PDA works seamlessly with your desktop scheduling and mail software and happily mounts NFS shares to sync documents.. (I do that at home - never done it in a corporate environment))
All updates and patches come from a single source, or can be aggregated into a single source using the same methods (you can run your own internal repositories and manage all your application maintenance - not just the OS and some applications (ala Windows) No more having a SUS server, a Anti-Virus Update Server and a million small updating systems and scripts..)

I guess what I mean is that Linux is as diverse as you need it to be, but that diversity can be harnesed and standardised standardised... Its easy to create policies and procedures to manage and maintain Linux environments, (and to automate that management) in a way that isn't possible with windows.

The obvious caveat with all this is that you obviously (as a large company) cannot just install the latest release of Ubuntu on your desktops, the latest version of PCLinuxOS on your laptops, Red Hat on your servers, some OE Linux flavour on your PDA's, Phones, switches, and Routers and just expect stuff to work. You need to think about it first, design a good system and then implement it well.

So does that sound like the ramblings of a gear head? I would assume I would use about 4 different distributions (All derived from Debian), plus probably different versions of those distributions (stable / unstable) across the enterprise. Every Specific role would have a base image (including as much software as possible that as common to sub roles (i,e, Common Drivers, X, a DM, NFS Client, Office and productivity software on the Desktops, Common Divers, Tripwire, SSH maybe NFS on the servers ). Fro these you derive your environment... All very neat, simple and safe.

Oh and you have all the code so the vendor cannot harm you by going bust.
Oh and you have your own update servers so they cannot be denied to you.
Oh and you can change where you get your updates from, as other distributions will use the same code.
Oh and you can make your own changes to your applications if you need to and have the resources.

I cannot think of anything that offers these kind of possibilities except Linux/BSD. but correct me if I am wrong.

Why listen to this guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

well-known healthcare CIO John Halamka Most well known for being the responsible guy for one of the biggest hospital IT failures on the books. All hospital systems out for 4 days? What kind of good CIO has that kind of failure on his watch?

See http://www.medical-journals.com/r0313.htm

His conclusion? Its NOT ready...

[NoGenius]

The author of the summary is flat wrong when he says the conclusion was "ready for the enterprise". If you actually RTFA the exact words were: "Though he personally is pleased with the OS, Halamka is not so sure he'd deploy it widely in his organization." Incredible that the poster of this article actually gets the conclusion 100% wrong. Biases like this is why nobody trusts technology people for an opinion of the readiness of new technology.

"Typical User" - no such thing

[Venik]

Here are some of the recent impressions from someone who just had to deploy a 120-node SLES 9 cluster, shortly followed by an 80-node RHEL 4 cluster. This is not scientific research, so here is my unscientific professional opinion: both RHEL and Suse are a royal pain the ass to install, configure and maintain.

I have over a decade of Unix sysadmin experience (Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, IRIX) and about five years Linux experience (Red Hat and SuSE primarily). To give you an idea of my personal preferences and my unbiased nature: my personal laptop runs Solaris 10; my work laptop runs Suse 10; my home PC is a Windows XP Pro; my work desktop #1 is RHEL 4 WS; desktop #2 is Suse 9.1; and desktop #3 is a Sun Blade running Solaris 10.

So what is my problem with Linux? I like Suse as a desktop system. It's easier to configure and re-configure then Red Hat, mostly thanks to Yast and some logical organization of things. I am not a GUI sysadmin: I live inside Korn shell. Still, having a well-organized GUI is useful because you just can't remember everything.

All the little annoying things, which I can deal with on my laptop or desktop, are multiplied to obscene proportions in a large cluster. Scali and Yast apparently don't like each other; there are strange transient NFS problems having something to do with large file support; patching is more complicated then it has to be with RHEL and absolutely infuriating with SLES.

I don't want to go into all the bugs and idiosyncrasies of the two leading enterprise linuxes, the bottom line is: you want reliability and performance - stick with the big 'nixes and leave Linux to ripen a bit more. You want a desktop, then go with Linux, if Windows is not your cup of tea. But be prepared to catch heavy flak from your former Windows users.

There is no such thing as a "typical user". Rather there are typical tasks. Web browsing, emailing, text messaging are all trivial things you can do with most modern operating systems. Or can you? How many of your users ran into problems with video and sound using a Linux desktop? Why don't Java applets in Web pages never seem to work right under Solaris? Why does a thousand other things go wrong?

Is Linux more buggy than Windows? I don't think so, but many of my users do. They are switching from Windows to Linux - not their choice to begin with - and, being already used to all the Windows problems, they find Linux bugs to be new and worth complaining about. A lot. I have Suse 10 running on my laptop PERFECTLY. Everything works right: video, sound, wireless, card reader, volume buttons and all the other little things that usually annoy Linux users. But it wasn't easy getting there and it has to be if Linux is ever going to squeeze Windows market share. Not every PC user is a Unix sysadmin and they don't have to be.

Well Twitter,

[ColdWetDog]

I'm glad you read the article. Now go back and work on reading comprehension. He's looking for a desktop OS replacement. I've worked in health care for over 20 years and desktop computers don't run health critical systems.

Desktop computers ("PCs" in the vernacular) run things like, please excuse me if this raises your blood pressure, Microsoft Office, Windows Explorer, Outlook and Bugs Bunny wallpapers. The critical systems typically use an embedded OS (ventilators and other machines that go "ping") or they run some UNIX variant (CTs, MRIs).

I'm trying desperately to get our small hospital off of XP. All we run are the above "productivity" apps and a bizarre VT100 terminal program that talks to the billing / order entry / lab system. Any reasonable Linux system would be fine except that company that runs the back end system won't allow anything but this oddball emulator to talk to their system. (Don't even think of VMware or similar - that's much too complex for them).

But anyway, don't have a heart attack if you see the green and blue wavy fields on the screen at your local ER. It won't shock you.

Now That's a Good Point

[HangingChad]

since MS support is really very, very bad

I have a live version of Kubuntu running on a machine downstairs. I could install the live version to test that hardware, network compatibility and that it could find the shared network printer and backup drives. It didn't cost anything and the few minor problems resolved online. Actually, there weren't any problems, all I had to look up were some installation instructions. Didn't need to buy anything, call anyone, wait for anything. Tomorrow I can install it if everything else checks out. What risk am I taking adding that OS to my network?

Microsoft support, like Dell's support, used to be THE reason to stay with Windows on Dell hardware. But lately they've both let their support slide. There's no reason to stay with them. There's no risk trying Linux. You can test everything before committing. And it doesn't cost...how much are MSFT service calls going for these days?