In the end it all comes down to support. I worked for a online ecommerce type company that was running Oracle RAC on redhat linux. As site load increased and the system instability increased (nodes would core dump or just freeze) we started the round of calls:
Call Oracle - are you running version X? You need version X...
Fibre channel controller - well we don't support that version, but we have a beta copy...
Storagetek - version Y
Redhat - I'm sorry, what you have is not a supported configuration of the enterprise edition, please come again.
What was funny is all the vendors were in a room an agreed we had a supported configuration until the trouble happened. When the Sh$t hit the fan basically you started going in a loop. To get a supported config for one vendor you invalidated it for another. This was all on a 24x7 site...you can't take the site down constantly, and switching to backup databases is not a trivial matter.
The thing is in the end CEO's don't care about anything other than it doesn't work. You spend lots of money on the Oracle license and that darn database is crashing all the time. Stability is everything in an enterprise environment. Also as an enterprise customer I do not want to talk to 4 different vendors, I want just one (easier to choke one throat!)
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What was funny is all the vendors were in a room an agreed we had a supported configuration until the trouble happened. When the Sh$t hit the fan basically you started going in a loop. To get a supported config for one vendor you invalidated it for another. This was all on a 24x7 site...you can't take the site down constantly, and switching to backup databases is not a trivial matter.
The thing is in the end CEO's don't care about anything other than it doesn't work. You spend lots of money on the Oracle license and that darn database is crashing all the time. Stability is everything in an enterprise environment. Also as an enterprise customer I do not want to talk to 4 different vendors, I want just one (easier to choke one throat!)