3 ms·

If you have hundreds of HP Proliant servers, all with the latest firmware patches and some level of support, and they all run a supported version of RHEL, with

by Ologn 11y ago

If you have hundreds of HP Proliant servers, all with the latest firmware patches and some level of support, and they all run a supported version of RHEL, with some level of support, and once a week a different machine crashes and dumps the kernel core - if you have RHEL (and HP) support, you have a way to escalate the issue. They have kernel programmers on staff who know what errors might be in the kernel code that talks to, say, host bus adapters. What does a normal corporation do in this circumstance if they are running Debian servers? Insofar as competition in this space, SLES has been popular in heterogenous environments (a lot of Windows servers). Canonical and Ubuntu are newer competitors on the scene. Companies have been using Red Hat for 20 years, they are pretty good at their jobs. Also, RHEL is a flagship but Red Hat sells support for other products like JBoss.

rodgerd 11y ago
> Also, RHEL is a flagship but Red Hat sells support for other products like JBoss. Last I checked they make about as much out of the JBoss-branded software as they do out of the platform stuff.
jldugger 11y ago
RHEL is 800 per server. If you have hundreds of these servers, you could pay a developer 80k to sit around learning kernel development on the offhand chance this comes up.
- jon-wood 11y ago
  You could, but that's going to be the unloaded cost of a developer, add another 80k for benefits, tax, and everything else that comes with an employee. Even after that you've got a single kernel developer who might have learnt enough about the particular part of the kernel you're having problems with. Assuming its the kernel. Either that, or pay 80k to Red Hat, who have dozens of kernel developers one of whom probably knows about your issue, and if it turns out not to be the kernel probably have someone on staff that can investigate that as well. Worst case they know who to contact upstream to dig deeper into your issue.
- rwmj 11y ago
  And the good thing is that companies are free to do that. Take Google, for example. They don't pay Red Hat because they have the code and they have amazingly smart kernel developers. But that's (surprisingly) still good for Red Hat, since Red Hat benefits from the contributions to the kernel that Google makes. It's good for all users of Linux.

by Ologn 11y ago

rodgerd 11y ago

> Also, RHEL is a flagship but Red Hat sells support for other products like JBoss. Last I checked they make about as much out of the JBoss-branded software as they do out of the platform stuff.

jldugger 11y ago

RHEL is 800 per server. If you have hundreds of these servers, you could pay a developer 80k to sit around learning kernel development on the offhand chance this comes up.

jon-wood 11y ago
You could, but that's going to be the unloaded cost of a developer, add another 80k for benefits, tax, and everything else that comes with an employee. Even after that you've got a single kernel developer who might have learnt enough about the particular part of the kernel you're having problems with. Assuming its the kernel. Either that, or pay 80k to Red Hat, who have dozens of kernel developers one of whom probably knows about your issue, and if it turns out not to be the kernel probably have someone on staff that can investigate that as well. Worst case they know who to contact upstream to dig deeper into your issue.
rwmj 11y ago
And the good thing is that companies are free to do that. Take Google, for example. They don't pay Red Hat because they have the code and they have amazingly smart kernel developers. But that's (surprisingly) still good for Red Hat, since Red Hat benefits from the contributions to the kernel that Google makes. It's good for all users of Linux.