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Why Red Hat linux?

M

mgmktx

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Joined
Jun 17, 2005
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7
What makes Red Hat the Linux for businesses? Is it just the level of support you get from Red Hat or are their other reasons?
 
reputation I guess. Its like mp3 players if you think of some an ipod will be in that list.
Apple were not the first to make them BUT they were first to really market it well and really take mp3 players to the masses

lots-o-ppl have done linux distro's and quite a few provide corporate support (SuSe do and so does Ubuntu now), but Redhat has been doing it for some time, plus they play nice with OSS
 
Redhat's site has tons of marketing drivel on why they're better for businesses... I suggest you go check all that material out.
 
tamasrepus said:
Redhat's site has tons of marketing drivel on why they're better for businesses... I suggest you go check all that material out.
Click to expand...

Sadly, it's marketting drivel that you don't need when you are looking for a real answer.

The answer, I think, lies in the dominant position Redhat enjoys in the linux community. Effectively, this means they are the standard for things ( although not really, and that terminology gets people really riled up. Just watch ). To give you an example; asterisk was designed for use on rh. It works on any distro with a bit of tweaking, but if you want the most painless install, use a rh clone. Most guides also base their info on rh distros too.

This influences business use as well; Which distro would you choose if you wanted to be able to find people to administrate and care for it? There really are only two choices; Debian distro or RH, with RH being the more pragmatic of the two.

Suse isn't really an option unless you are a novell house. And with the deal with MS, it's becoming less and less relevant ( I'll get yell at about that as well ).
 
Yes - they offer support by as an official enterpise solution which is what companies want to see. They could care less that so and so has been using Linux since Redhat 4...
 
They are a real company that provides real support and charges real money for it. From a managers perspective at many places, there are three answers in that one sentence. Rather that is bad or not can be debated.

From a technological perspective, Redhat can probably claim the widest industry support. There was a time when there was basically nothing built to run on Linux that did not offer instructions tailored for Redhat. That was of course 5+ years ago, and things have changed tremendously, but it did build them a great reputation.

They also got a great reputation for being the most taught Linux distro, particularly in the late 90's.

Things have changed a lot in the Linux world since RH had a big upper hand though, and anyone involved with Linux today can tell you there is little difference between most distro's at a nuts and bolts level. There are also a lot of new or reformed distro's out there that provide great support as well- like Novell's SEL, Xandros, or even Ubuntu.

So, the answer to the question is probably 'reputation'. That answer obviously holds true in a lot of industries of course, not just computer and technology :)
 
Not to mention having a RHCT/RHCE cert is a very respectable certification.
 
Mostly support, but they also offer training and consultation services and other important aspects of a vendor for business's. Also being one of the first to offer the whole package from a single source has helped their reputation.
 
because no where else can you go to the company, say "We need a distro to do a, b, c, and straight out of the box" and get said company to compile and design a distro for you.

We use RHEL9. Drop the thing in and it would work like a normal RH install, or you can type RAC for an oracle rac install, or ER10 for an ER10 install... and get a completely customized (including partitions, ASM space, etc) install just the way you want it, standardized, and all we have to do is give it the IP and hostname.

No one else can offer that.
 
lopoetve said:
because no where else can you go to the company, say "We need a distro to do a, b, c, and straight out of the box" and get said company to compile and design a distro for you.

We use RHEL9. Drop the thing in and it would work like a normal RH install, or you can type RAC for an oracle rac install, or ER10 for an ER10 install... and get a completely customized (including partitions, ASM space, etc) install just the way you want it, standardized, and all we have to do is give it the IP and hostname.

No one else can offer that.
Click to expand...

qft +1
my job is the same way blast the server set up ip and hostname make sure the console works and thats it
 
Mostly, I think it is support. You get 5+ years of updates. Also, many pieces of commercial Enterprise software and hardware are tested to run on RHEL. For example Oracle DB and VMware. I have first hand experience with VMware and support. A client of mine had a support contract with VMWare, but since the version of linux they were using, (Fedora Core 4) was not on VMware's list of supported OS's, they could not provide a lot of help. Nothing against VMWare or anything. I just wonder if they, or many other companies, have the resources to support the many distributions of linux. Even though most distributions run basically similiar, it's the differences that sometimes make the support aspect challenging.
 
Strong support when it comes to drivers is another big advantage. I've built some Linux-based RAC systems attached to extremely high throughput storage subsystems (on the order of 128 15K spindles and dual to quad 2Gb fiber paths to each node) and from the device drivers to configuring the OS i/o scheduler to dealing with multipathing, it sure is nice to have engineers to call. Home users may not recognize the value of this, but anyone who has seven-figure hardware investments sitting around depreciating because of an OS or driver issue will know the importance of having that support network.

That said, it's been a small joke at least within the Oracle community that Oracle employs far more RH-certified engineers than RedHat ever did. Now that Oracle has branched out with a RHEL4 clone that is backed by (IMO) a much stronger support network than what Redhat itself offers, and integrates with a pretty strong software infrastructure stack, I wonder about RH's future as the dominant Linux platform for business.
 
sphinx99 said:
Strong support when it comes to drivers is another big advantage. I've built some Linux-based RAC systems attached to extremely high throughput storage subsystems (on the order of 128 15K spindles and dual to quad 2Gb fiber paths to each node) and from the device drivers to configuring the OS i/o scheduler to dealing with multipathing, it sure is nice to have engineers to call. Home users may not recognize the value of this, but anyone who has seven-figure hardware investments sitting around depreciating because of an OS or driver issue will know the importance of having that support network.

That said, it's been a small joke at least within the Oracle community that Oracle employs far more RH-certified engineers than RedHat ever did. Now that Oracle has branched out with a RHEL4 clone that is backed by (IMO) a much stronger support network than what Redhat itself offers, and integrates with a pretty strong software infrastructure stack, I wonder about RH's future as the dominant Linux platform for business.
Click to expand...
oracle still doesn't have the ability to customize a distro like RH can. RH can custom make you linux, and then install Oracle. Oracle can't make you a custom linux, but gives you oracle. Depends on what you need more.

We're not switching to Oracle, as a Fortune-15 company... we're using RH and oracle as an install
 
Redhat, or derivatives like CentOS, are THE standard in the web hosting industry as well. All of the control panels are written to work on Redhat the best and that is the distro that everybody knows so we stick with it.

Redhat kickstart is nice as well, I can set up a new server in about 10 minutes, just PXE boot it and select the option you want from the menu. I know that kickstart will work for any RPM based distro but I've only tried it with CentOS and Fedora.

One more thing, people say that Debian has more packages available but that's simply not true. Check out the RPMForge repository for yum, there's over 5000 packages available there.

I've been thinking about getting an RHCE for a while, I have plenty of experience working on CentOS and Redhat so it shouldn't be too hard.
 
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