Simon wrote:
AT the risk of starting a flamewar.....I am being advised by consultants
that I need to 'upgrade' my Fedora Core servers to RH Enterprise as it
is 'more robust', 'better supported', 'easier to upgrade' etc etc. We
are currently running them as our webserver (informational only - no
transactions), mailserver and intranet webserver (this one is a bit
slow, but just needs more RAM).
I am unaware of any major differences in the products that would require
us to change over and start paying for what we now do for free -
maintenance has been trivial, yum runs regularly via cron, downtime has
been non-existent.
I'd make a quantitative, detailed and concrete evaluation of what's to be
gained (or not gained) by switching from Fedora to RHEL. This is
important to minimise subjective judgement as to what's the benefits
to be derived from the exercise. It will be easy to argue when you
have quantitative and concrete data at hand to support your case. Your
management can see immediately what is at stake without wasting too
much of their valuable time.
Considering that software being used defines how much time is to be used in
maintenance and how much downtime there is going to be,
I'll start with this table.
Estimated Maximum Time per Week
------------------------------------------------------------
Webserver Mailserver Intranet
------------------- ----------------- -------------------
MaintTime Downtime MaintTime Downtime MaintTime Downtime
------------------------------------------------------------
1. Fedora 4hr/wk 0.1hr/wk 4hr/wk 0.1hr/wk 4hr/wk 0.1hr/wk
2. RHEL 4hr/wk 0.1hr/wk 4hr/wk 0.1hr/wk 4hr/wk 0.1hr/wk
Cost of Software
One time On-going
--------------------
1. Fedora No Cost No Cost
2. RHEL $$$$$ $$$/year
Then, I'll make a case to say there is no advantage to use RHEL over
Fedora in terms of MaintTime(maintenance time) and DownTime but there
are cost involved in having RHEL and none for Fedora. From experience
when maintenance is outsourced IT spends additional time throughing and
frowing trying to communicate with the outsourcing parties and these
times are added overheads. Outsourcing makes sense for large organizations
dealing with critical information like transactional data like in Banks,
Financial Institutions, Securities, and similar Inst.
No management will favor having to spend money for no benefit to the
organization.
The bottom line is the cost must be justified by the benefits to be gained.
And hopefully, the case is decided in favor of Fedora in your situation.
O Plameras
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