[Bioclusters] how are the Redhat product changes affecting existing and future plans?

Chris Dagdigian bioclusters@bioinformatics.org
Tue, 04 Nov 2003 10:57:14 -0500


Another item that has been on my mind recently...

What are people doing about RedHat deciding to kill off their consumer 
product line? Are people going to pay the freight for Redhat Enterprise 
Linux or are people just going to use Suse/Debian/Gentoo etc.

My needs are pretty simple but I'm having a hard time placing myself 
into Redhat's current product plans.

I need:

1. A stable OS with a product lifetime of at least 1 year (ideally 2+)
2. Product errata, updates and security patches for full lifespan
3. No OS or product phone/email support or SLA

The RHL transition to Fedora Linux is fine but it sounds as if the OS is 
going to change very fast (major updates 2-3 times per year). On the 
plus side it is still free and the leaders seem committed to fast errata 
and security updates. Still I can't see using this on a production 
cluster due to the pace of change and the chance that I'd be left 
without updates if I froze on a particular Fedora release.

I can justify (maybe) the cost for the $125 product (Redhat WS) that 
they are pitching towards compute clusters. The update services and 
5-year product lifespan is worth paying for. The big question for me is 
what do I have to pay _after_ the initial $125 purchase. I can't seem to 
find any info on the Redhat website telling me how much I'll have to pay 
  for updates after my intial 1-year RedHat Network service runs out.

This also leaves the question of what RHEL flavor to run on cluster head 
nodes, fileservers and database machines. $349 for RH ES could be 
justified for a critical node but damn what if I want to run that stuff 
on Opteron or Itanium or a node with 4CPUs? The cost for RH AS (starting 
at $1400) is not justifiable to me. Putting a 'cheap' RHEL flavor on a 
head node and manually compiling/updating/supporting additional network 
services built by hand from source or .srpms may be more of an 
operational headache than the cost savings justify.

I'm torn right now between diving back into Gentoo/Debian or possibly 
jumping on the Suse bandwagon given their existing support for Opteron 
etc. Novell just bought Suse today so who knows what that is going to do.

I'd be interested in knowing how current RHL users are planning the 
transition and how future cluster buyers are changing their plans. 
Personally I think I'm going to need to stay on top of RHEL for project 
that demand it while also maintaining some sort of deep familiarity with 
one or more alternatives.

-Chris