Hi Zane, You may have gone through this exercise already, but I thought it is worth mentioning it here too, for whom may benefit from it in the future.
In my experience I found that there are two main reasons a company buys external support for its systems. First reason is to plan for future development. The company providing support can investigate and give written assurance of compatibilities for future acquisitions and advise of integration and scalability issues. They can also share from other clients experience who use similar systems and/or faced similar problems. The second reason is business insurance. Having certified support is a contributing factor in saving on the business insurance premiums, especially when it comes to IT. There are other reasons too why a company may want or need support, but I think it is outside the scope of this thread to elaborate as they are not necessarily Linux related. As for troubleshooting and continuity, the rule is simple: if it is not documented the support is helpless. I had my share of experience with commercial Unix and best of breed RDBMS where even the most common "restore from a previous successful backup" - given as a last resolution by the highest level escalated withing support - didn't fix the problem (hint: corrupt page/block/chunk chain) For best troubleshooting and continuity support the common practice is either to hire in-house expertise, which I believe it is your company's case because they hired you - and did a good job with it I might say - or outsource the entire maintenance, with binding contractual SLAs and penalties, to a company specialised in such activity. So when qualifying companies for support, there are more factors to consider on top of the quality of their technical expertise, which may prove not to be the primary factor in their shortlisting. However, certification or vendor endorsement has to be a must. Have I gone too OT here?... Cheers, Adrian On Tue, 2008-11-04 at 14:50 +1300, Zane Gilmore wrote: > I have been doing some assessment work on Redhat. > > AFAICT Redhat charges approx $500NZ per year per server. (that's the > bare bones basic subscription) > and approx $1200 per year per server for 12X5 telephone support. > There's a more expensive 24X7 one as well. > > Does anyone on the list have any experience with Redhat's services? > > What I'm trying to figure out is whether it is worth my employer > spending it's money > on some of these subscriptions or whether we just go Centos and muddle > through. > I am not the world's most experienced sysadmin but I *can* usually > muddle through. > > My experience with another supplier (which at this point will remain > nameless) was appalling > when I went to them for support. > That was the reason we were using their distro was because it was > supported but when I tried to > get that support for a quite obscure problem they were hopeless and I > fixed the problem myself eventually. > > Cheers, > Zane > > > > >
