I just want to clarify this portion of the message. Redhat Enterprise Linux is enterprise, as you can get enterprise level support by buying a subscription.
That having been said I would not consider deploying a home-grown storage solution on RHEL to be a supportable storage solution for an enterprise. That's why large companies purchase EMC and Netapp. Sure, you might have a superstar sysadmin that knows how to make RHEL run circles around a Netapp, but what happens when that guy steps in front of a bus tomorrow? I guess you have to look at this from the enterprise perspective. A supportable solution from an enterprise perspective means it can be deployed almost anywhere in the world (a large financial institution customer of ours has offices/data centers in every continent except Antarctica) and hardware or software can be fixed by competent engineers no matter where that might be. EMC offers this, but you do pay a premium for it. When you start looking at the enterprise support offerings provided by EMC and Netapp, among others, you soon realize that the hardware cost is negligible compared to TCO. EMC, Netapp, and other companies like them are selling storage as a "service", not as hardware. You pay them X dollars a year and they provide you with a storage service, fully supported, replacing drives and other parts as they fail. Most people might look at those that buy EMC and Netapp and think "they're crazy/stupid to waste their money." Those that have had to provide 99.999% uptime to a mission critical banking application realize that the support cost is a bargain compared to the amount of money lost due to loss of service, even for a short amount of time. When you are talking about losing $millions per hour that the application is down, $200,000 a year for support is really a drop in the bucket for peace of mind. I'm not sure where OF will fit in with this model. I can see your point in that third-party support vendors will rise to meet the demand. As an OF user, I would welcome that. Regards, Luke -----Original Message----- > This is why a packaged and supported hardware+software solution is enterprise, but a Linux distro that you can load on generic beige-box hardware and create a mini-SAN out of is not. > Hence you're saying Red Hat Enterprise Linux is -not- an enterprise product according to your definition? _______________________________________________ Openfiler-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openfiler.com/mailman/listinfo/openfiler-users
