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

[Matt Temple]

A further question will be this -- is the proposed "fedora" project 
going to produce something
fundamentally different from the redhat releases that we've seen over 
the last few years?
Hard to tell.   And certainly, if it's available for ftp download, it 
will be easy to
distribute.   Just because new packages are released frequently, we 
don't have a problem...
necessarily.   But we MIGHT have the following problem:

If a user goes the Debian route, the Debian package installer will 
happily upgrade
any necessary packages to make sure the newly installed package has all 
of its dependencies
dealt with.   Without RedHat Network, upgrading is a PAINFUL 
fetch/check/fetch/check problem
that can be very difficult to resolve.

I believe that for a rich, complex OS like Linux, our ability to keep 
the product up to date
without spending large amounts of management time wandering through the 
morass of dependencies is
crucial, to say the least.   For $60 a node/year for our regular 
machines, that's been fine.
But now????   I can get OSX from Harvard UIS for $39.   I can get 
Debian for free.   Are we just seeing
the birth here of another Solaris?   Who needs that!

									Matt Temple


On Tuesday, Nov 4, 2003, at 10:57 US/Eastern, Chris Dagdigian wrote:

>
> 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
>
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
========================================================
Matthew Temple                Tel:    617/632-2597
Director, Research Computing  Fax:    617/632-4012
Dana-Farber Cancer Inst       mht@research.dfci.harvard.edu
44 Binney Street,  M L105     http://research.dfci.harvard.edu
Boston, MA 02115              Choice is the Choice!