Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

[Posted March 14, 2012 by corbet]

Mark Shuttleworth claims that Ubuntu deployments now exceed RHEL deployments for "large-scale enterprise workloads." "The key driver of this has been that we added quality as a top-level goal across the teams that build Ubuntu – both Canonical’s and the community’s. We also have retained the focus on keeping the up-to-date tools available on Ubuntu for developers, and on delivering a great experience in the cloud, where computing is headed."

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achtung

Posted Mar 14, 2012 15:47 UTC (Wed) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

Six month release cycle and decent release quality are somewhat conflicting (as has been proved by Ubuntu many times already), and Mark seems a bit wrong regarding quality when it's rather about price. This kind of opportunism is very alarming.

achtung

Posted Mar 14, 2012 16:24 UTC (Wed) by rfunk (subscriber, #4054) [Link]

Ubuntu's "LTS" competition against RHEL is on a two-year release cycle in order to have decent release quality.

Some differences...

Posted Mar 14, 2012 16:30 UTC (Wed) by gwolf (subscriber, #14632) [Link]

Ubuntu's main product is shipped with a six months schedule. When a LTS comes along, developers pay some extra attention to long-term support issues, but the distribution's focus is still TTBOMK the six-month fresh distribution with new cool stuff in it.

RedHat is just the other way around. They have a six-month thingy they base their work on (Fedora), but it's clearly not their product. Their product follows a quite longer release cycle.

The results clearly come from the premises.

Some differences...

Posted Mar 16, 2012 11:30 UTC (Fri) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

Exactly right - if an LTS candidate was further stabilised for 6-12 months with only bug fies in that period, I can imagine an Ubuntu LTS being somewhat reasonable quality. At the moment the LTS badge is almost meaningless other than indicating the duration of updates.

Some differences...

Posted Mar 19, 2012 8:55 UTC (Mon) by dsas (subscriber, #58356) [Link]

Roughly, they will be more conservative updating some packages. For example they're packaging gnome3.2 plus some cherry picked 3.4 apps/libs, rather than 3.4 as they would normally.

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 14, 2012 15:48 UTC (Wed) by fhuberts (subscriber, #64683) [Link]

What has he been smoking?
I want some of it too.

A re-confirmation that this guy is lost, and has been for a while.

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 14, 2012 17:16 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

Well, if he is right in claiming that his strategy is validated then Canonical will surely be making a healthy profit very soon. If not, then there's not much to write home about, is there?

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 14, 2012 16:09 UTC (Wed) by miguelzinho (guest, #40535) [Link]

The comments on his blog pretty much says everything.

1) He is not counting CentOS, just RHEL.
2) He is calling "Enterprise" just web servers on the Internet, IMHO that is not "Enterprise" at all.
3) How about some serious stats, like how many LTS subscriptions Canonical has sold?

I'm a Debian guy, if I had to pay for an operating system, I would choose RHEL. It is a common feeling among many friends of mine that the quality of the Ubuntu releases are getting worse and worse.

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 14, 2012 17:04 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link]

For electronic design automation, it's all RHEL/Centos or SuSE. Ubuntu isn't a factor. And these are massive deployments: server farms of thousands of machines to do verification.

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 14, 2012 17:42 UTC (Wed) by jgg (guest, #55211) [Link]

I run all my EDA stuff on Ubuntu.. EDA has a big GUI/interactive component for much of the work so the desktops are all Ubuntu and all run EDA GUIs. Servers run Ubuntu or Debian as well, since we already know it works. RHEL 5.x is so lame on the desktop it isn't really worth pursuing. Everyone is much happier with Ubuntu, and the newer kernel and hardware support means I can buy faster, cheaper, better desktops.

I've been doing this for 10 years with all the big EDA vendors. The idea that the distro matters much for something as straightforward as EDA tools is a myth.

Sometimes there are minor problems, but it is never hard to fix them.

That said, in an 'enterprise' environment (eg, shared home directories, Active Directory, kerberos, etc) Ubuntu tends to suck. I still haven't figured out how to get kerberos authenticated printing to work, for instance.

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 14, 2012 18:13 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Which illustrates why it would be a fantastic idea for Ubuntu to take a different approach then Redhat.

Ubuntu has the opportunity and huge potential. The technology exists now through things like sssd, Samba4, FreeIPA, and other things were Linux can finally actually start to compete with Active Directory.

Things like:
Large scale desktop deployments.
Use Ubuntu servers to replicate and extend Windows domains.
Integrate Linux into Windows AD environments.
Work with NAS developers to integrate Active Directory features into their products to remove the need for Windows servers in small/medium businesses to support Windows desktosp.
etc etc.

This sort of thing is huge for Microsoft and is something that Redhat and other major Linux distros do nothing to address.

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 14, 2012 18:32 UTC (Wed) by miguelzinho (guest, #40535) [Link]

I couldn't agree more with you.

Unfortunately, Mark insist in using resources with Unity, UbuntuTV, Ubuntu with Android and a lot of other useless stuff that does not help at all to close the bug #1.

Well, it is his money, so he spends the way he see fits.

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 14, 2012 19:41 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

The technology you cite doesn't just happen. SSSD and FreeIPA are projects created and maintained by Red Hat which also has a heavy investment in Samba4. It is obviously designed to be a integrated replacement for AD now and more so in the future. Investing in these pieces would great for competing vendors as well since its all free software but that wouldn't really be a different approach.

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 14, 2012 23:33 UTC (Wed) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

> Investing in these pieces would great for competing vendors as well since its all free software but that wouldn't really be a different approach.

I disagree.

Redhat is largely targeting large enterprise systems were people are still depending on NIS and other obsolete and insecure protocols. These companies are under intense pressure to modernize their systems and take security, auditing, and accountability up to modern standards to meet certification and regulatory requirements. The alternative is to use Active Directory and then using add-ons to connect their unix systems to that.

The price for Redhat directory server is, what? 2000-3000 dollars? And that is on top of what is charged for their servers. Meanwhile.. a SBS server (Exchange/AD/IIS) ranges from 300 dollars to 1500 dollars or so.

And Redhat expects that you have experienced Linux administrators on staff to support and integrate their directory server into the existing infrastructure. SBS is designed for first time server purchasers who are small business owners with minimal expertise. They often will hire somebody for 200 bucks or so to spend a afternoon setting it up for them and that is about it for a 'IT staff'.

Remember Windows home server?

They had a neat feature were you can have pretty much ultimate expandable storage. Just plug in a drive and 'go'.

Linux can will be able to do that shortly with btrfs... with hopefully (fingers crossed) with much better results then Microsoft did. A home/SOHO/SBS server with that feature should be quite a coup since Microsoft had to abandon that due to reliability issues. It was a fantastic and desirable feature for most people. Should get people's attention at least.

There has to a niche that Ubuntu can dive into and compete with SBS and Home servers. Ubuntu branded NAS devices and internet gateway appliances were Ubuntu works with people like Barracuda Networks or something like that. That is something that Redhat totally has shown utterly no interest in.

This sort of thing is how Microsoft got it's start in the 'big enterprise environment'. They got bought by companies looking for cheap OS to throw on cheap hardware and as those companies grew so did Microsoft's offerings. Now Microsoft has the dominate server operating system for American corporations. This is something that Ubuntu needs to figure out how to do.

Then on top of that Canonical can do it's Canonical thing and integrate it's cloud services, mobile offerings, and whatever else it wants into it. Maybe make it 'Home cloud with exterprise cloud sync' blah blah. Store bookmarks on it and back up your messages. Whatever they think sounds cool.

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 15, 2012 1:27 UTC (Thu) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]

> They got bought by companies looking for cheap OS to throw on cheap hardware and as those companies grew so did Microsoft's offerings. Now Microsoft has the dominate server operating system for American corporations.

I have the distinct impression they came in on the desktops. The server room came from the fact that nobody can interface/manage Windows as well as Microsoft, since it's their OS.

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 15, 2012 2:08 UTC (Thu) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

'Redhat is largely targeting large enterprise systems were people are still depending on NIS and other obsolete and insecure protocols'

That was true in the past but isn't the current focus atleast not solely. Replacing legacy Unix systems can only go so far.

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 14, 2012 17:14 UTC (Wed) by zaitcev (guest, #761) [Link]

Mark is making an assertion that OpenStack Essex has all requisites fulfilled by a specific LTS release as if it distinguishes Canonical's product, whereas in fact it is equally easy to run Essex on RHEL 6.2 with EPEL, or Fedora 16. It is somewhat dishonest for those who do not know all the facts, in my opinion. Instead, he should have talked about the historic association of Ubuntu and OpenStack instead. For example, Ubuntu provides OpenStack with bug tracking. That is a positive example of community cooperation between OpenStack and Ubuntu and a plus for Canonical. I am quite certain that deployment numbers for OpenStack on Ubuntu are greater than OpenStack on Fedora, too, at least for now. Mark does not need to resort to spin and false implications to make his point. -- Pete

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 14, 2012 20:01 UTC (Wed) by Klavs (guest, #10563) [Link]

The biggest choice of CentOS vs. Ubuntu LTS for a job, should (and is for me) be primarily abouth which distro has the packages you are going to put on the LAN/WAN in their Long-Term supported repository.

EPEL isn't long term supported - so you don't get much benefit choosing Red Hat instead of CentOS there.

Is the packages used to run OpenStack Essex fullfilled by the packages in Ubuntu's LTS repository?

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 14, 2012 20:03 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

'EPEL isn't long term supported '

What do you mean by that? Packages in EPEL are typically maintained as long as the release is maintained.

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 14, 2012 20:35 UTC (Wed) by marrusl (subscriber, #67123) [Link]

I think by supported, he meant that you can buy a service contract for it and get an SLA. I didn't think that was the case with EPEL.

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 14, 2012 20:42 UTC (Wed) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Not for the whole repository but packages migrate from EPEL to base RHEL for major releases and in updates and with Red Hat's strong involvement with OpenStack recently and Red Hat developers maintaining the packages for both Fedora and RHEL, this is just a matter of timing of the releases.

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 15, 2012 6:10 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

If you are looking specifically for a service level agreement, and are comparing vendors you need to be clear about what is actually covered in the support contract.

I very much doubt Canonical offers service level agreements for the entire repository of software that Ubuntu provides. And I'm not even talking about _universe_.. just the _main_ repository. For example... the upcoming LTS KDE is in the main repository, Kubuntu has an LTS release.. but Canonical is not going to be providing commercial support for Kubuntu.
Confused yet?

What Canonical does and does not actually support when you pay them support dollars seems very opaque to me. I can't really understand it, but I'm also not seriously look at any support options from anybody so take my lack of understanding with a grain of salt. I find that the RHEL support information is much clearer.

-jef

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 15, 2012 19:10 UTC (Thu) by kklimonda (subscriber, #60089) [Link]

I'm pretty sure (as in I've asked Kubuntu developers about it) that most of the Kubuntu packages are going to be demoted to universe, although I'm not sure when will that happen. I don't really think being LTS has anything to do with being supported by Canonical - Xubuntu has always had LTS releases (and 12.04 will be supported for 3 years) but it always has been part of the universe repository.

I agree that the "level of support" from Canonical seems very opaque though, and I'm also not quite sure how does the support really look like.

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 15, 2012 19:28 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

That is exactly my point. Once someone is actually looking at purchasing support instead of just looking at availability of commercial support as a bulletpoint when choosing a gratis deployment... its tough to understand exactly what Canonical is offering in terms of value for money. Which software do they provide support for? It's not as clear as everything in main and nothing from universe.

What I believe is happening is that a lot of gratis Ubuntu users out there have to make a choice between Debian and Ubuntu. They look at the "optional" commercial support from Canonical has a benefit that Ubuntu provides over Debian thinking that you know worst case, if we ever really need it, Canonical will support whatever we are doing with Ubuntu since we are using evertying from the official Ubuntu repositories. Canonical gains Ubuntu deployments by being overly vague about support details. I

But in reality, what Canonical actually is able to support is quite narrow. Probably more narrow than what RHEL is able to support. Difficult to assess accurately as Canonical provides very little in the way of public details as to what your money buys you. End of the day this lack of clarity hurts their support business. Because when people need to spend money on support, the details suddenly matter a whole lot more.

-jef

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 15, 2012 1:44 UTC (Thu) by pabs (subscriber, #43278) [Link]

The response from the Debian Project Leader:

http://upsilon.cc/~zack/blog/posts/2012/03/not_a_catchy_h...

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 16, 2012 23:07 UTC (Fri) by philh (subscriber, #14797) [Link]

I somehow missed that Zack's post was prompted by Mark's edited graph, but I did look at the full graph and think:

I wonder if the customers that look to be moving from RH to Ubuntu are the sort of customers that pay a lot of money for support, or the cheapskates, because if it's the latter, then Ubuntu are doing RH the huge favour of sucking away the customers that probably generate the bulk of their support costs without providing much of their revenue.

It wouldn't surprise me if that's the case, as this is only the web servers we're looking at, and people that find it easy to decide to jump ship probably don't have thousands of servers all running RedHat somewhere.

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 16, 2012 23:22 UTC (Fri) by dlang (subscriber, #313) [Link]

> I wonder if the customers that look to be moving from RH to Ubuntu are the sort of customers that pay a lot of money for support, or the cheapskates, because if it's the latter, then Ubuntu are doing RH the huge favour of sucking away the customers that probably generate the bulk of their support costs without providing much of their revenue.

The problem is that history has shown that the bottom of the market keeps climbing and eating away at the high-end.

Businesses that decide to only support high-end customers and avoid customers that are the low end tend to find that their customer base shrinks over time

If you think about it, this is exactly what the traditional Unix vendors thought about Linux

Ubuntu quality...

Posted Mar 16, 2012 11:28 UTC (Fri) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]

Given the very dubious quality of Ubuntu Desktop in the last few years, I think Ubuntu has nothing to shout about here. Even on hardware chosen carefully to run Linux well, freezes and lockups are very common and in one case I had to move off Ubuntu completely. This is quite apart from the technical strategy of Unity, Ubuntu for Android, and various other nice ideas that don't contribute to a high quality desktop.

Ubuntu Server seems quite stable as far as I can see, but I haven't used it so much.

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 16, 2012 18:44 UTC (Fri) by dlang (subscriber, #313) [Link]

While I think that Mark is missing how much RHEL is in use in non-Internet visible locations, I think it would be a good thing for RHEL to have some serious competition.

RedHat won the datacenter with a combination of luck and planning. They did their IPO at a good time to get some serious money to grow with, and they managed to get Oracle to bless them as 'THE' supported flavor of Linux.

However, before all of this, they got their foot in the door of the datacenter by being the distro that people were using for their desktops at home. When they abandoned the desktop to focus only on the Enterprise, they sacrificed a lot of this 'feeder' footprint. Fedora has picked up some of it, and it's taken a LOT longer than I expected, but I think a similar thing is happening now with Ubuntu. People running datacenters are installing the distro they are familiar with.

If Oracle really wanted to damage Red Hat, the easiest way for them to do so would be to certify Suse, Ubuntu, and possibly Debian Stable as supported platforms for their databases. There are a lot of enterprises running RHEL everywhere because that's the only supported way to run Oracle, and if they are running it for Oracle, why would they go through the pain of supporting another distro instead of just using RHEL everywhere? Unfortunately Oracle just wants to take over the RHEL near monopoly (and are failing at doing so).

I believe that while certifying Oracle on other distros would be a huge blow to RHEL, I think it would be a very good thing for Linux overall.

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 16, 2012 22:35 UTC (Fri) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link]

Maybe I'm reading this page wrong:
http://www.novell.com/products/server10/oracle/matrix.html

But it looks to me like Oracle does certify SLES already for their database product. So RHEL does have competition already with regard to Oracle certified options. From SLES and from Oracle Linux itself now. Why Oracle doesn't want to widen the competition further, is something you'll have to press Oracle on. Does Oracle really want Ubuntu competing with their own linux distribution now that they are making their own offering and starting to build that up as a differentiated feature set from RHEL at the kernel level? Oracle could very well have its own reasons to not introduce more competition. Who the hell knows really.

But I do not think at this point that a large Ubuntu userbase is going to be the thing that sways Oracle. Debian has a huge userbase and Oracle isn't certifying against Debian already. Whatever has to happen to unthaw the Oracle/Canonical relationship is going to be a closed door deal and its probably going to involve someone paying cash to someone else. Who pays whom is really going to depend on which party needs the other more.

-jef

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 16, 2012 22:57 UTC (Fri) by dlang (subscriber, #313) [Link]

I really don't think Oracle wants any competition, they want to take over the near monopoly that RHEL has in enterprise datacenters, not just improve competition there (which would probably still result in them getting greater penetration of their flavor of Linux)

Oracle is acting very much as if they are betting on winning everything, and are willing to risk getting nothing rather than aiming at winning something, with almost no risk of getting nothing.

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 22, 2012 13:43 UTC (Thu) by jeremiah (subscriber, #1221) [Link]

That's an impressive last sentence there.

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 18, 2012 12:25 UTC (Sun) by kjhambrick (subscriber, #23704) [Link]

What concerns me most about Ubuntu is that I've been recently seeing Linux Systems Administrators having the same unremarkable level of experience as many 'Admins' among the current generation of Windows Admins:

FalseHood="I run Windows on my home PeeCee. I know how-but-not-why to click-click-clickety-click. I think I am a Administrator, therefore I am a Windows Server Administrator."

Now: echo "$FalseHood" |sed -e 's/Windows Server/Linux Systems/g' -e 's/Windows/Ubuntu/g'

-- kjh

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 18, 2012 12:47 UTC (Sun) by dlang (subscriber, #313) [Link]

This isn't anythng new. I ran into Solaris Admins with the same problem back when Solaris was the 'professional' OS and Linux was the 'hobby' OS

There are also a lot of RedHat admins who don't know how to do anything without the GUI.

any system that becomes popular will have a large influx of such 'admins'

Shuttleworth: Ubuntu vs RHEL in enterprise computing

Posted Mar 19, 2012 7:41 UTC (Mon) by kjhambrick (subscriber, #23704) [Link]

Indeed. Point conceded :)

-- kjh