I’m curious as to the differences between using a commercial, supported version of Linux in the enterprise and a non-supported one. Now, I know all the regular arguments – they’re implicitly stated in my article about Icarus Support Contracts.
But here’s the beef: I’m not convinced that commercial Linux companies really offer a safety net. Or to put it another way – they may offer the net, but I’m yet to see much evidence that it’s actually secured to anything. It almost seems a bit like the emperor’s new clothes, and I believe we’re seeing a real surge in popularity of distributions such as CentOS for precisely this reason.
Here’s the sorts of things I’ve commonly seem from customers with commercial enterprise Linux distributions who say, log support cases with the Linux distributor:
- Being advised to just simply apply the latest patches – OK, sometimes this is valid, but we all treat such recommendations with caution;
- Being advised to search Google forums, etc.;
- Being mired in finger pointing hell – it seems that most features or components a company will want to log a case over aren’t covered by the expensive support contracts that come with enterprise/commercial Linux;
- Getting average and/or highly complicated responses that don’t inspire confidence.
In short, I worry that commercial enterprise Linux distributions provide few tangible benefits over repackaged or alternate distributions.
As proof that I’m serious about this subject, I’ll say something that years ago may have made me apoplectic: Even given how little I like Microsoft’s products, my honest observation is that companies with Microsoft support contracts get substantially more benefit at substantially lower cost than those who have similar support contracts with the enterprise commercial Linux vendors.
So, I’m asking people to convince me I’m wrong – or at least provide counter-arguments! If you’re using a commercial, enterprise Linux, please help me understand what value you get out of their support programmes – examples of problems they’ve solved, and how they’ve proved themselves equal to (or better than) support offerings from either Microsoft or other Unix providers. Any examples/stories that touch on data backup/recovery or storage would be of particular interest.
So feel free to add a comment and let me know what you think!
maybe i wouldn’t take support on any box in an organisation but we’ve had a couple of really good experiences with RedHat support where patches were made within a couple of days for rh directory server which were really critical issues. I’d hate to think what the impact would have been without support…
although this is ofcourse purely anecdotal i have a way better impression of rh support than for example networker support from emc.
just my 2cts
If you want to run enterprise software like Oracle RDBMS or SAP ERP you won’t get support from these companies if you don’t run it on a supported OS with valid support contract. These companies do only support enterprise Linux (e.g. SLES, Redhat). That doesn’t mean it won’t run on opensuse, etc.. But you don’t want to run into trouble when SLAs have to be fulfilled.
I don’t know one support case in the last 3 years regarding Linux which has been solved by using enterprise Linux support contract. Also problems where solved by our admins themselves (with help of google and forums).
Another catch is that often packages for enterprise Linux software is only available as rpm, e.g. Networker. I know that it is possible to convert but it’s annoying.
I totally agree with you. There’s little value in support contracts for enterprise Linux. But I already wrote you the reasons why we still have them.
@Otmanix – I actually fully agree/understand with having support, and recognise that many application vendors – from Oracle to SAP to even EMC, etc., require that you run their product on a vendor-supported operating system.
But if the primary tangible benefit people get is continued support from application vendors, as opposed to something tangible from the OS support provider, does that not speak to there being an issue with the way in which the OS support contract works? I guess that’s the heart of my concern…
I think the support contract is peripheral to why people run the Enterprise linux versions.
I know in my industry, customers can pay tens of thousands of dollars per year for CAD and chip-design tools. These tools vendors want their tools running on a very predictable version of Linux, to increase the chance that if the customer has an issue, it can be duplicated in their lab.
We’ve been told in no uncertain terms that problems on CentOS are not good enough, they have to be reproducible on stock Enterprise linux. This ironically leads to a situation at a number of companies where there are one or two fully paid up Enterprise systems, and the rest run the CentOS version. Problems are always validated on the Enterprise system before the vendor gets involved. (Incidentally, I’ve never seen a problem on the CentOS fail to validate on the Enterprise system. Which itself speaks volumes to the quality of both the Enterprise and CentOS distributions.)
The cost of an Enterprise support contract is just noise at these levels. What we care about is the tools. If the Enterprise vendor wants to monetize that dependency, well like I said, it’s just noise, and most customers are going to limit it anyways.
Now theoretically if there is a specific OS issue that is revealed by the workings of these tools, the contract would permit you to get at specific fixes faster; but in ten years of doing this I’ve never seen that scenario played out either.
I think one argument that’s not quite been brought up yet, is a need for liability insurance. It’s usually the same reason customers stick with a commercial Unix.
Yes, SCO’s not rattling the sabres as much anymore (if at all), but it does not mean this won’t come up again in the future. Some customers (Mil/Med/Finance all come to mind) will require that security, usually for regulatory purposes.
Is it fair to summarise that so far what I’m seeing is a tendency for people to be suggesting that the business benefits (perceived supportability, vendor support, regulatory requirements) outweigh actual technical reasons?
I’ve had a number of occasions where Redhat support have offered very good levels of service, both from the perspective of having to chase down obscure problems as well as working with third parties as appropriate.
If nothing else, it’s an extra head count working on a problem that frees the people here from having to chase things down all the time.
We do have a Microsoft support contract and I have to say that they also provide “average and/or highly complicated responses that don’t inspire confidence”.
Some time ago we had an incident with a Win2k/SQL Server 2k installation that began having page corruptions. After 3 months Microsoft ended up saying that we had to change our application.
The issue was finally solved after migrating our system to Win2k3/SQL 2k5