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

[Goran Ceric]

Do you know anything about their Professional Workstation product?

http://www.redhat.com/software/workstation/

I found it for sale on buy.com for 82.57. I might buy it just to see 
what it includes. I kind of think it doesn't come with per-machine or 
per-cpu license or that outrageous service agreement or whatever Redhat 
calls it, and I believe it's based on their "Enterprise" line meaning 
that you could use same rpms.

Goran

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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