Red Hat's pockets bulging on strong Linux, JBoss sales Enterprise Linux vendor Red Hat posted strong financial results for the third quarter of its fiscal 2014 on Thursday, with earnings that beat both analysts' estimates and the company's own earlier guidance. Revenues for the quarter ending on November 30 were $397m, up 15 per cent from the same period a year ago. In the …
...these folks could double their money overnight.
I've never quite understood why the biggest money-maker in Linux is the company with the distro that is so annoying to administer. If Torvalds weren't such a cheerleader and wasn't constantly spurring the community on to do most of Red Hat's heavy lifting for free, I doubt that the company would be half its current size.
Strange that I find RHEL a lot easier to manage than Debian and always have done.
I have to take issue with your last point. If you look at the contributions to the overall Linux Codebase, those from RH Employees are huge. Could it be that the rest of the Linux Distros (Ubuntu excepted because they seem hell bent on doing their own thing) are relying upon RH to do the heavy lifting?
@Steve Davies 3 - "Strange that I find RHEL a lot easier to manage than Debian and always have done."
- To each his own. I find the apt tools to be superior to yum, especially in terms of upgrading packages, cleaning up after an uninstall, and keeping the system free from debris.
"Could it be that the rest of the Linux Distros (Ubuntu excepted because they seem hell bent on doing their own thing) are relying upon RH to do the heavy lifting?"
- Yes, that could very well be. It could also be that all of Red Hat's priority kernel work gets an automatic green light from Torvalds, meaning that Red Hat gets enormous free community assistance on all its pet kernel projects. I would be interested to find out if engineers at Canonical and SUSE feel that they are receiving the same "favored state" status for their kernel projects.
Maybe the reason that Canonical is "hell bent on doing their own thing" is that they've found that only Red Hat gets much assistance anyway. If you don't want to be a Red Hat clone, then what's the point of going along with the Red Hat cheerleaders?
"- To each his own. I find the apt tools to be superior to yum, especially in terms of upgrading packages, cleaning up after an uninstall, and keeping the system free from debris."
Don't forget the many deb package proxying options you have in debian which don't seem to have any equivalents in rpm land*. That alone is a deal breaker for me.
Your choices appear to be:
A) Download the same packages where N = number of servers you manage.
or
B) Download every package in the Redhat repositories and maintain your own mirror, even though you will never actually use 99% of the packages available there.
* If there is a reliable solution available then by all means educate me, I have a bunch of rpm based VM's that I would love to be able to point at a local proxy instead of the internet.
Yeah, but that just uses standard squid, which is not really a viable option. The problem is that squid will flush items that have not been used for a while which means that after a few mins/hours/days depending on how you have it configured all the cached items will disappear. Subsequent requests for those files will initiate a re-download.
A proper package caching system is specifically tailored to deb packages. Once downloaded a package will be cached indefinitely. The advantage of this is that if I were to install LMDE on a new PC from a CD, then when it goes to do the first mega update of everything new since the CD was created then it can get them all from the local cache, even if it has been months since you last did an install.
If you just use your standard squid proxy then it would need to download it all again from the source because all those packages would have been flushed from the cache by that point.
Given that all you're really getting from Redhat is support (otherwise you'd be using Centos, right?), I have often wondered whether that is really value for money, especially for their MRG product. Something like £3000 per year per installation. That's a lot of money; 60 of those and you'd want a RH support engineer dedicated to you 24/7, but I doubt you'd get that.
Scientific Linux is a better bet.
Disclaimer : Use Redhat commercially, CentOS for home experimentation stuff, have dabbled in other distros to check out what's there.
Support in a corporate environment is an absolute essential : taking your example, using 10 installed servers would cost £30,000 per year : about the cost of a developer with a few years experience these days. And if you're running 10 seperate servers, you are processing a LOT of transactions, whether on the web or in your database, so your turnover would be such that this would be peanuts.
Redhat is utterly boring, straightforward and reliable, best used for application server and database gruntwork where it's highly efficient in a bare bones one task only per server configuration .That's their selling point, and in my opinion they really deliver on it.
This is the reputation that enables it to be trusted : try a "but you should use my favourite free distro instead" argument in an established business where their systems are mission critical and you will be told all this in no uncertain terms. Does that mean that you're wrong? Possibly not, but you need to learn why companies are risk averse in such fundamental choices.
We only support Windows.
When we get new customers and they are on RHEL or whatever, they have to install Windows.
Because we only support Windows.
Our stuff is written in Java, runs on JBoss and is platform independent (I make sure of that).
It runs fine on non-Windows.
But still, we are required to only support Windows.
Reason? "Because we only support Windows".
---
Makes me a sad anon.
"When we get new customers and they are on RHEL or whatever, they have to install Windows."
I am surprised you get new customers that are on RHEL, in that case.
Culture can only change from within in my opinion, so keep at it and good luck!
"I am surprised you get new customers that are on RHEL, in that case."
We do, but the Architects/Directors here are heavily schmoozed by MS; so they promote MS (to the point of telling everyone how Win 8 will eclipse Apple in all arenas).
To be fair to MS, they do do a lot of work to help bring customers and vendors together with various shindigs in exotic locations.
Once in, we then promote SharePoint, Outlook etc etc. Again, we support those because "that's what we support".
"so they promote MS (to the point of telling everyone how Win 8 will eclipse Apple in all arenas)."
Looks like they were right then. Windows 8 overtook OS-X already, and Apple havn't even got a touch capability in a fully featured OS to compete with it...And Windows phone is consistently growing market share and already overtook IOS in a number of countries...
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We actually support anything with a vendor-supported Java Runtime Environment and frankly, recommend against windows .... all you need is a minimalist Linux install with a JVM. We provide an application server, although you can use your own ...
We run in, but do not support, OpenJDK. We sell enterprise software, if we have a P1 and we nail it down to the JVM, there is not much the customer can do with OpenJDK, is the stance .... Imagine some 20 000 headcount corp has a P1 with a bug in Oracle or IBM JVM, I am sure Oracle/IBM will not patch it over a fortnight ... whereas in OpenJDK, you might be able to contact one of the maintainers to fix it ... handing over a Kraft envelope in gratitude ... ;-)
You could maybe get a support contract from Redhat for OpenJDK in which case we will support you, not sure how that goes, though.
We support all main databases (DB2, MaxDB, MS SQL Server, Oracle, Postgres, Sybase), and as said above, any platform/OS combination that has a supported 1.6+ JVM. OpenIndiana is my OS of choice.
We recommend Postgres for small to medium installs, Oracle RAC for really big ones ... recommend against SQL Server and Windows for obvious reasons.
"and frankly, recommend against windows .... all you need is a minimalist Linux install with a JVM."
You might want to try using Windows Server - Oracle JVMs at least run better on Windows in my experience. For instance the Calypso trading platform is something I have experience of on both Linux and Windows and it performs better and more reliably on Windows, and the services are much easier to manage.
"We recommend Postgres for small to medium installs, Oracle RAC for really big ones ... recommend against SQL Server and Windows for obvious reasons"
What are those obvious reasons? Windows + SQL Server has far fewer security vulnerabilities to worry about than the other options that you mention, has a lower cost of ownership - and is much more powerful and fully featured than Postgres. RAC I can see as being an advantage if you need true active / active - but you certainly pay for it......
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