On 2 Jul 2008, at 4:22 pm, Prentice Bisbal wrote:
2. Now that I'm a professional system admin who often has to support
commercial apps, I find I have to use a RH-based distro for two
reasons:
A. Most commercial software "supports" only Red Hat. Some go so far as
to refuse to install if RH is not detected. The most extreme case of
this is EMC PowerPath, whose kernel modules won't install if it's
not a
RH (or SUSE) kernel.
We have that problem as well, with HP SFS. The way we get around is
simply that we run our older Lustre clients using Debian Sarge with a
SuSE 9 kernel, which is perfectly possible, if a bit icky.
B. Red Hat has done such a good job of spreading FUD about the other
Linux distros, management has a cow if you tell them you're installing
something other than RH.
Fortunately, our management doesn't have that fear. In fact their
fear is usually the other way around: Following the reams of broken
promises from certain large UNIX vendors in particular about the
future of certain products and features, which required us to copy
petabytes of storage to new filesystems, which took more than six
months. Our IT management now has a completely rational fear of
buying commercial UNIX products, because the company might be bought
out, change its focus, charge you a fortune for continued support, or
all of the above. Consequently, we go for open source stuff whenever
possible, and as far as the distribution was concerned, Debian was the
obvious choice -- and pretty much the only choice at the time, since
Fedora did not exist, and I'm still not sure how separate from Red Hat
Fedora and CentOS really are, but that's probably just my ignorance.
The fact that we could easily demonstrate that Debian did everything
we needed of it on a technical level made the decision a very
comfortable one for the management.
Another aspect to our choice of Debian is that pretty much all of the
bioinformatics software written here is itself open-sourced and given
away, and if you, as a small genomics lab, want to run mirrors of
various chunks of our stuff, you can, without worrying that any part
of it might have licensing issues.
Tim
--
The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research
Limited, a charity registered in England with number 1021457 and a
company registered in England with number 2742969, whose registered
office is 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE.
_______________________________________________
Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org
To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit
http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
