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How Can I Justify Using Red Hat When CentOS Exists?
Bocaj writes "I recently spec'd out a large project for our company that included software from Red Hat. It came back from the CIO with everything approved except I have to use CentOS. Why? Because 'it's free Red Hat.' Personally I really like the CentOS project because it puts enterprise class software in the hands of people who might not otherwise afford it. We are not those people. We have money. In fact, I questioned the decision by asking why the CIO was willing to spend money on another very similar project and not this one. The answer was 'because there is no free alternative.' I know this has come up before and I don't want to beat a dead horse, but this is still a very persistent issue. Our CIO is convinced that technical support for any product is worthless. He's willing to spend money on 'one-time' software purchases, but nothing that is an annual subscription. There is data to support that the Red Hat subscription is cheaper that many other up-front paid software products but not CentOS. The only thing it lacks is support, which the CIO doesn't want. Help?"
By and large the CentOS team do an excellent job with the distribution - but it's a volunteer effort and there have been some notable times lately when important or security updates which have been shipped by Red Hat run late with CentOS, sometimes by a considerable amount of time.
If the CIO wants CentOS over Red Hat, he also needs to be prepared to accept the risk of delayed updates, no guarantees to updates or bug fixes and that one annoying time a particular server suffers an obscure bug, there won't be a vendor to go back to for obtaining a resolution.
Give Red Hat a call. Seriously, if their sales department can't justify it for you, it's not justified.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
If you can't answer the question 'what does the support buy you?', then you can't answer this. Most of the time, when people talk about support at the enterprise level they mean adding features and fixing bugs that are important to the company paying the bills. Do you have the expertise in-house to do this? If so, then there is no advantage in Red Hat over CentOS (unless it means you can make some of your in-house people redundant). If not, then it has some value. If you can do it all in house, then do: that's the main economic advantage of Free Software, that you always have competition when it comes to providing support, you never have one vendor that is the only one that can fix the bugs that you care about.
If you can do it in house, then don't try to persuade your boss to let you pay Red Hat, persuade him to let you send any fixes or enhancements that your team makes to the relevant upstream projects. This is likely to be much more valuable to those projects than your handing over a pile of money to a third party.
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The question is not how much support costs. The question is how much is DOWNTIME going to cost the company?
When you hit a problem your team can't solve what dollar value is that? Granted, for anything using a LAMP stack it is probably just as efficient to spin up a new server and start over versus a lot of money for support that isn't going to figure out all your custom stuff anyway.
I swear by IBM System i with IBM support. It's outrageously expensive, but they will call support engineers after hours when you have a problem level 2 can't handle. Microsoft's comparible offerings require a thousand seats.. IBM will sell you support for just one server.
In my case we have three steel mills worth $10k+ per hour of downtime... Even more if downtime causes rework. If we have more than an hour down I have vice presidents in my bosses office!
I suppose it's up to poster's boss, those C.I.O. Letters make it his decision... and his ass will be on the line when you have to explain why he didn't line up something to cover for things the minions can't handle.
Since ANY system you use will require that you learn SOMETHING about it your title is misleading.
The scenarios are:
1. Your people can already handle the task
2. Your people need to learn more and do so without additional expenses
3. Your people need to learn more and do so with additional expenses
4. Your people need to learn more and do NOT do so
5. You outsource the project and dump the scenarios onto the outsourcing company.
It doesn't matter which platform you choose. So Linux is still free (and Free like speech) as long as you have a brain and can learn.
CentOS's release schedule has been really struggling recently. Release 6 was almost edging a 250 day delay over Red Hat.
CentOS have still to announce an official date for 6.1 to be released, which Red Hat released back on May 19th. There is a lot of uncertainty regarding CentOS releases and as such in my opinion makes CentOS not the ideal choice for the enterprise.
Other advantages are Red Hat's support services and the Red Hat Network (RHN) are second to none. RHN alone is what convinced us to pony up money for licenses.
The gist of the advantages are: better support, quicker updates/security fixes, easier and centralised management of multiple servers with the only disadvantage being a price tag.
How about for one thing its a perfect example of the "free rider problem" and why FOSS companies like Novell and Mandriva slowly bleed to death and simply can't compete with the R&D that Apple and MSFT spend?
I mean how many here even KNOW where CentOS came from? Because its not a nice story folks, and its a perfect example of why the leeches will bleed FOSS to death. Once upon a time there was a company that sold hardware that ran...you guess it...RHEL on it, but someone at that company said "Hey, if we strip all the copyrighted stuff out we can just take what we want and not have to pay RH shit! We'll save a bundle!" and so CentOS was born. And before anyone says "Well herp derp RH doesn't complain" what do you expect them to save? "Hey community please stop butt fucking us please?"
It is also a classic example of short sighted thinking shooting yourselves right in the face. Who gives more than any other company when it comes to giving back to the community? Why that would be RH. Now how do they pay for that? Ooops, didn't think of that, did you? Its the same reason I doubt you'll be seeing any companies opening their hardware anytime soon, as AMD bent over backward, even hiring coders to help the FOSS driver guys and opened their specs as wide as they could, and what did they get? every forum filled with guys saying "Herp derp, buy Nvidia".
Pretty much everyone with a brain is saying the economy will get much worse before it gets better as not only have we hit bottom yet on the two previous bubbles, but we have two MORE bubbles that could burst any time, the student loan bubble and the retirement bubble. Now what do you think is gonna happen to RH if the economy continues to tank and more and more potential and former customers take the same route? I'll tell you, first they'll have to scale back, which will make quality suffer. patches will take longer, new features won't be implemented, things will get worse, this will then cause more to leave as there are OTHER OSes they can have for free, right? Then you end up in a death spiral and if you aren't careful Red hat is another Novell. don't forget once upon a time both Novell and Sun were powerhouses in the industry too.
This is why I have been saying for ages "free as in beer" needs to die and be replaced by "free as in freedom" only. Hell even RMS says there is nothing wrong with making money from your code as long as others have the freedom to modify. But sadly what we'll see instead is short sighted thinking like in TFA, where they'll expect this poor schmuck to "just Google it" to solve even the most complex problems with ZERO support, hell they might even reward him by cutting his staff! Meanwhile MSFT and Apple get paid year after year after year, they have NO problem spending money on R&D and advertising, they just keep on coming. How are companies like Red Hat that are busting their balls for the community gonna survive if everyone says "Just use CentOS"?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I used to run an AS/400 system. And you're right. IBM's support rocks. One time the keylock was broken on the unit, and we needed it working. My support guy came out, verified the situation, then told me the bad news - "The nearest part we have in stock is in New York." (I was in California.) Then my support guy smiled and said, "The good news is that I've gotten ahold of of one that's on an airplane right now, headed this way. It will be here in 45 minutes."
Now THAT is support. :-)