On Wednesday 11 February 2004 12:00, Christopher L Merrill wrote: > Any thoughts about which direction we should go? Chris,
I would have to strongly suggest SuSE's Enterprise class of products. I have been using the SLES (SuSE Enterprise) for a three years at a half dozen production sites each utilizing from 2 to 5 servers, and at my own offices. These sites are a number of electric utilities which utilize these servers for the outage restoration applications. This is a basis for their entire operations department on a day to day basis, and compromises a critical infrastructure component for these utilities. Simply put, outage restoration is the process of getting your power back out once it has gone out (due to an ice storm for example :) ) We utilize a combination of custom written software, Oracle production databases, and a bunch of the regular utilities such as mail, bind, snmp, etc. The main reason for choosing SLES over RHAS had to do with the support that was available for our Oracle databases. These install and configuration of these databases can be very complex, and SLES provided (and still does provide) much better support the RHAS. In addition I do prefer the methodology that SuSE utilizes for administration, and package maintenance, although that is a matter of choice, but in a production environment seems to be the best for me. My background in the old Unises (SunOS, AIX, Tru64, HPUX) made me feel more comfortable in SuSE then in RedHat. I have had experience with the exact same software utilizing RHAS 2.1. Although I normally highly recommend to my customers to utilize SLES, this one customer required us to run our software on a RHAS platform due to standardization within the compnay. I agreed completely with their decision to utilize a "standard" within their company. Although, in retrospect, I should have tried harder to convince them to switch to SLES as their standard. At the time the big issues we had were with hardware drivers (Broadcom nics come to mind), and the lack of LVM and Reiser Filesystem support in RHAS 2.1. Both of those issues have come back to bite us hard. To be frank, the software components work exactly the same on both RHAS and SLES, and I know that RHAS 3.0 does have LVM support. These are my opinions, and if you would like more details, let me know, and I can provide them. Ron -- TriLUG mailing list : http://www.trilug.org/mailman/listinfo/trilug TriLUG Organizational FAQ : http://trilug.org/faq/ TriLUG Member Services FAQ : http://members.trilug.org/services_faq/ TriLUG PGP Keyring : http://trilug.org/~chrish/trilug.asc
