An RHEL believer writes...

An RHEL believer writes...

Posted Nov 4, 2004 4:06 UTC (Thu) by hmsjohnd (guest, #24241)
Parent article: Enterprise Linux: is it broken?

At my company, we were frustrated for a long time, and hesitated moving from 7.3 to RHEL. At the end of the day, our decision was based on business. We think of Red Hat as an MSP; they provide updates, stability, and compatibility with 3rd party vendors. We focus on our core business model, and we can still make necessary adds and changes to the kernel, OS, and packages to suit our needs. RHEL also supports releases for longer than the hardware is going to be assigned to one function. When we have servers that have literally been up for years, this means a lot to us!

I wouldn't recommend using RHEL without the Satellite, because it's one of the major reasons we chose it. If someone wants to make a free Linux distro better, think about adding a full-featured web portal like that. Provisioning... PXE/Kickstart... Sure, we can go out and do that on our own, but will our hodgepodge of open-source tools be tighter-knit? Doubt it. RHEL is successful because it's practical - perhaps some of the free distros need to look at the big picture. Red Hat isn't *taking* anything from the community, it's providing an example of what customers are willing to pay for. How about a free alternative? If your distro du jour comes out every 6 months and is either too cutting edge or too conservative, why are you still wondering about RHEL's success? Where is the free distro with Enterprise bundle? I'm not talking about bloat, I'm talking about intrinsic, modern "Enterprise" functionality.

I don't think people look at TCO and ROI. Dog and Pony show aside, RHEL probably costs you less money over time than hiring employee(s) to duplicate the functions.

The Red Hat reps will negotiate pricing. Obviously, there are volume discounts. If you never really use support, and you have a central server for updates (no bandwidth leeching), are you really costing them that much resource-wise? No. Start off small, download updates manually... No legions of lawyers with red fedoras or BSA agents are going to show up at your office.

For the record, almost all of our admins are die-hard Slackware, Debian, Gentoo, etc. users on our laptops and on multiple home machines. Seeing a "dialed" network serving tens of gigabits of traffic with hundreds of machines usually converts non-believers, *at least at work* ;)

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