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Linux misses Windows of opportunity (The Age)
An Australian publication called The Age
looks at a failed attempt at a transition to Linux.
"Mr Horton called in Red Hat-recommended contractors to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux and ensure it was configured according to SAP standards, a process which took two weeks.
"You have to be using the right certified components, otherwise SAP won't give you the support. To go through and match everything off was quite tedious," Mr Horton says. "After doing all that, we came to a very interesting situation where the machine would basically, putting it in Windows terms, core dump or blue screen at random. It would run for weeks or so and then just bang, it would stop.""
(Thanks to Andrew Kornak.)
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Linux misses Windows of opportunity (The Age) Posted Sep 29, 2005 18:25 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] The link to The Age demands a free registration; if you're not prepared to fill in the form, cut the query string off the end of the URL, and it'll let you straight in, reinserting the query string.
Linux misses Windows of opportunity (The Age) Posted Sep 30, 2005 0:21 UTC (Fri) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] Fixed link
Linux misses Windows of opportunity (The Age) Posted Sep 29, 2005 20:22 UTC (Thu) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link] Heh. I like how he calls "core dump" a Windows term.
Linux misses Windows of opportunity (The Age) Posted Sep 29, 2005 21:45 UTC (Thu) by ninjaz (guest, #2083) [Link] This looks like the main problem: "You have to be using the right certified components, otherwise SAP won't give you the support."
Having worked as a Unix system administrator for a decade, I have routinely seen vendor requirements which called for specific patchlevels. Unfortunately, they usually weren't updated to allow for security and bug fixes. It really is a nightmare to be caught a catch-22 where the "Enterprise Solution" software vendor won't support the OS because it's not their product, but demands a broken patchlevel of the OS as a prerequisite for providing support.
Of course, this type of vendor behavior is by no means limited to Linux. I have seen the same with other vendor operating systems as well.
Linux misses Windows of opportunity (The Age) Posted Sep 30, 2005 15:19 UTC (Fri) by ken_i_m (guest, #4938) [Link] ninjaz hits it on the head. We have been running SAP on Red Hat for almost two years now. We do not have instability problems. Yet from a security point of view the patchlevel required by SAP is "dated" to say the least. So, we treat the SAP servers like Windows... lots of perimeter security wrapped around them.
Linux misses Windows of opportunity (The Age) Posted Sep 30, 2005 19:39 UTC (Fri) by cdmiller (subscriber, #2813) [Link] The problem appears to be with the SAP product rather than any version of Linux. If SAP wanted such specific requirements, why don't they supply their own version of Linux bundled with their product?
Linux misses Windows of opportunity (The Age) Posted Sep 29, 2005 22:10 UTC (Thu) by ajross (subscriber, #4563) [Link] Some of the problem here is no doubt real: we've all seen instability, bugs and crashes on every platform and every system.Some of it might well be bias on the part of the article author or IT manager. Since it's one data point, some of it is clearly "bad luck" and not relevant to a platform flame war. But most of it, I suspect, is that the "Enterprise" market is a bloody mess. IT managers routinely buy systems they don't understand, with requirements that they don't enumerate to their suppliers and integrators. One has to wonder how much of this has nothing to do with Linux *or* Windows and more to do with the supplier (SAP, in this case) figuring out the problems over time and getting it right with the second try. Some of the symptoms, like instability (presumably on the same hardware) under Linux where Windows runs fine do happen. Others, like the complaint that "The installation of SAP took two days on Windows, the installation on Linux Red Hat took two weeks." are less credulous and point to a competence problem on the part of the admins.
Linux misses Windows of opportunity (The Age) Posted Sep 29, 2005 23:58 UTC (Thu) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link] Looks like Redhat shouldn't of recommended those 'Redhat-recommended contractors', eh?
Linux misses Windows of opportunity (The Age) Posted Sep 30, 2005 1:37 UTC (Fri) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link] Well nobody is free to end up wrong, you can't be wasty here.
But do to importance of ISV (SAP) and importance off the reginal contractors or not(dont know), maybe it would be nice to "reconstitute the crime", and see what part is rotten. Prestige and in consequence finance ability are on the line.
Do the actual clima of the IT world, it would be no surprise if the result comes out to be a surprise. The only thing that never stops to amaze and disgust is how much everybody seams to be affraid of such forensics. If done right it could be profilatic and nobody has to get burned unnecessarly.
But since a pure science world like IT is too much influenced by stupid clueless plain dumb little marketeerlushes, worst than the common joe many times sited in this forums, a guess i'll be out off luck.
Linux misses Windows of opportunity (The Age) Posted Sep 30, 2005 1:58 UTC (Fri) by mmarq (guest, #2332) [Link] " If done right it could be profilatic and nobody has to get burned unnecessarly "
Sorry to mark my own point, but is very importante to say that * noboby as to get burned at all if no negligence or faul play are detected *.
Edit Posted Sep 30, 2005 14:06 UTC (Fri) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link] Due the actual climate of the IT world, it should be no surprise if the result comes out to be a surprise. The only thing that never ceases to amaze and disgust is how much everybody seams to be afraid of such forensics. If done right it could be profilatic [ OK, I'm beat: cathartic, prosaic, prophetic, prophylactic? ] and nobody has to get burned unnecessarily.
Linux misses Windows of opportunity (The Age) Posted Sep 30, 2005 2:27 UTC (Fri) by gdt (subscriber, #6284) [Link] IT managers routinely buy systems they don't understand, with requirements that they don't enumerate to their suppliers and integrators. That's not the case here. The company chose SAP, then an operating system supported by SAP, then the hardware supported by that operating system. They had maintenance contracts in place with all three vendors. They then looked to a vendor-certified consultant to configure the operating system. They went to pains never to have unsupported software running. In short, the customer has acted in exactly the fashion that the vendors would prefer. But the vendors haven't got their act together -- Red Hat and SAP disagreeing about automated software updates. Red Hat attempting to replicate a customer fault by taking the customer's system offline rather than setting it up in the lab (making me wonder if they even have the "supported" hardware in the TAC lab). There's a strong tone of "blame the customer" in responses to failed Linux deployments. In this case I think it's pretty clear that the customer acted cluefully, including abandoning Linux after giving a vendor more than ample time to solve a Priority 1 support call. I don't place much creedence on "We asked the customer to do a diagnostic test and the customer never responded". TACs always like to keep faults in Customer-Pending, and the simplest way to do that is to keep asking for differing tests to be run rather than building and investigating the customer's scenario in the lab (which moves the responsibility back to the TAC). So if the customer pulls then pin the odds are that there will be an outstanding action on the customer in the fault handling system. I like Linux, I use it. But if vendors are going to charge even more than Cisco for support then they need to at least offer that level of response to Priority 1 faults. Otherwise it's more than fair if customers question the value of a Big Vendor Linux deployment.
Linux misses Windows of opportunity (The Age) Posted Sep 30, 2005 21:39 UTC (Fri) by sbergman27 (subscriber, #10767) [Link] You are assuming that the problem is reproducible on other certified hardware, or even on "identical" hardware. In cases like this it is quite simple for the hardware vendor (IBM) to "prove" that the problem is not defective hardware. Just send a tech in, run some official diagnostics, and certify it as good. Never mind that the problem only occurs after weeks of heavy load.
My bet's on borderline hardware in this case.
And of course, there is always the possibility that the customer is not even telling the full truth.
I'm not saying that's the case, but with "Citizens Against Goverment Waste" and the "Initiative For Software Choice" active again, who can tell what's true and what's not, and who might getting paid to say what?
Linux misses Windows of opportunity (The Age) Posted Oct 1, 2005 16:32 UTC (Sat) by foo@share-foo.com (guest, #7940) [Link] You may see my RHEL3 is not linux comment below. After countless hourschasing the paid vendors RH and IBM, the only time I received anything near an adequate response was when I bypassed both by writing to an adaptec email address embedded in the ips driver source code. Apparently this guy had hardware and was extremely willing to try to find the problem. He ran two separate tests to try to reproduce the problem in three days. IBM and RedHat never even tried. Unfortunately this particular problem was very sparse. It only seemed to happen every couple of months on most systems so it is not surprising that the short adaptec test didn't find the culprit. To me, based on recent experience, it looks like RedHat is aiming to be the new sco. I can't even get their sales people to give me quotes on bulk pricing let alone any support when I find a bug.
Linux misses Windows of opportunity (The Age) Posted Sep 29, 2005 22:44 UTC (Thu) by csawtell (subscriber, #986) [Link] Just so you all know: "An Australian publication called The Age" is the daily newspaper published in Melbourne, which is the capital city of the State of Victoria.
No autoupdate? Posted Sep 30, 2005 7:37 UTC (Fri) by HenrikH (guest, #31152) [Link] What strikes me as odd is that they claim that Linux was a hassle to manage since SAP wouldn't certify a system that was automatically patched, while they later claim that the benefit of w2k3 was Windows Update where they could apply automatic updates!?
Also no where in the article is any information regarding if SAP itself has done any error checks, perhaps their Linux version is buggier than their Windows version?
No autoupdate? Posted Sep 30, 2005 10:43 UTC (Fri) by sfuchs (subscriber, #28196) [Link] As someone who administers SAP systems on Linux and Windows I can tell that their allegations are obviously untrue. SAP's policy is the same for every supported OS: you are allowed to install vendor supported updates, except those that concern the kernel or C/C++ runtime libs. The latter have to be certified by SAP. I would certainly not enable automated installs of windows updates on any SAP server or even user pcs that need to access it. For example Windows XP SP2 has broken important functions of the SAP GUI frontend and the patch that fixed the problem was released weeks later.On the other hand, if you are not running mission critical services and you accept having to reproduce any bug on a supported platform in order to get support, you can successfully run SAP on generic hardware and a wide range of Linux distros. I have much less work with my SAP servers running Gentoo Linux than with those on Windows. And I would never install a large database on Windows.
No autoupdate? Posted Sep 30, 2005 15:27 UTC (Fri) by HenrikH (guest, #31152) [Link] And also, shouldn't you really put the SAP servers on bastion hosts, that is run netfilter on each and every server and only allow incomming SAP requests.
Then there would not be many pathces that you would have to install on these servers since there would be no other services accessible than SAP.
Also I think that the complaining guy in the article uses far too many Microsoft dictionary words (TOC and so on) for me to honestly blieve a world he is saying.
Linux misses Windows of opportunity (The Age) Posted Sep 30, 2005 15:50 UTC (Fri) by maceto (guest, #16498) [Link] This admin here is just a plain idiot.Mistake 1:
"Bill Gates code" update is fine and rehat is not? were one can actually block out kernel C updates, or select updates that one want.
This is just one of these guys that all here knows about.. I know it- but when it comes down to it they don`t.
If the computer just frezes up, well then one have lots of info to go on (linux, however Windows you have to pay $$$$ to get the same info- sometimes atleast)
Had a friend who is a SAP consultant- OH he knows everything about IT, well he had a year of DHCP problems from his ISP (home line) did he know how to fix that?? no
RHEL is NOT linux Posted Oct 1, 2005 16:08 UTC (Sat) by foo@share-foo.com (guest, #7940) [Link] I find it interesting that he is using RHEL3 on IBM hardware. I hadsimilar problems. It seems the backported, dead-end, experimental IO subsystem in the RHEL3 Frankenstein kernel stolen from 2.5 is fubared somewhere. I had a dozen boxes of the x345 variety w/ 6i cards all with similar problems. Basically all IO would lock from time to time. This included terminal access so we couldn't get any dump info. Various versions of the ips driver worked better or worse than others. Neither IBM or RedHat could find fix or even reproduce the problem. Down grading to a real linux kernel, 2.4.31, fixed the problem. Moral of the story. RHEL3 isn't linux.
Linux misses Windows of opportunity (The Age) Posted Oct 2, 2005 19:37 UTC (Sun) by cpm (subscriber, #3554) [Link] I found the closing line very interesting;
"The installation of SAP took two days on Windows, the installation on Linux Red Hat took two weeks. The total cost of ownership is actually lower in this case than with Linux because of the hidden costs of the support."
Isn't that directly from the "Get the Facts" playbook?
I wonder what actually happened.
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