This reminds me of another point I should have brought up in my previous post about people and politics: The myth that commercial software has better support. It seems managers always want to buy commercial software it's supposed to have better support.
From my experience that is a complete myth. When I was using SGE and Open MPI for my previous cluster, I could send an e-mail to the mailing lists for those packages, and usually get a resolution in a couple of days at most. Often, I'd get a useful response with hours, sometimes minutes. And even more impressive, the resolution would normally come from one of the developers who's "volunteering" his time. Sometimes, my requests/bug reports would lead to updated code I could download and test within a couple of days. >>>> This may be true.. however, do you have metrics in a nice 1 page summary >>>> to prove it? The commercial vendor sure does. You put up your "time >>>> from problem to time answer received" histogram and ask the vendor to >>>> *promise* (with money attached) to beat it. I could mention many other open-source packages I had similar experiences with, but they're not cluster related. With commercial vendors, I've found resolutions typically take weeks or months. One case took 18 months. I have one issue open with a vendor now thats about 6 weeks old, and no root-cause resolution in site, just a bunch of workarounds. Just for the record, I'm NOT an open-source zealot. I just like to get my job done and go home at a reasonable hour. >>> Metrics are your friend.. Sure, either side can argue that "our problem was >>> harder, so it took longer to solve", but first impressions count. Your >>> plot with the big hump at 6 hours and no tail past 48 hours trumps the hump >>> at 12 hours with a tail to 168 or 8000 hours.. 95% percent closure within X hours vs 20% closure within X hours is a very compelling argument, before you get into the nitty gritty details about the issues being closed. _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, Beowulf@beowulf.org sponsored by Penguin Computing To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
