Guest post by Right after the recent news that Red Hat is offering a new subscription for mission critical deployment that extends the life-cycle for up to 10 years, Red Hat has announced another, that allows the customers to stay in a single point release for up to eighteen months and continue to get updates and support that point release. Matt Asay writes: “Red Hat has set the standard for world class software support, consistently earning top marks with CIOs for its efforts. On Thursday, however, Red Hat outdid itself, introducing a new product support plan called Extended Update Support. In a nutshell, Extended Update Support enables customers to run their mission-critical systems for longer stretches of time without having to take production systems offline to update them.”
What can I say? Red Hat is doing things very, very right. This is a great refinement to their already pretty fine policies. (Go Red Hat!) My only gripe (and Rahul, you knew there would be one 😉 ) is the departure from the 18-24 month policy on new major versions. 18 months would be so ideal for my customers. And it looks like RHEL6 might be around 30-36 months from the RHEL5 release? Or is my guess off the mark? On the other hand, they do seem to be updating the RHEL5 desktop apps a little more aggressively. So maybe it isn’t as important as it used to be.
Edited 2008-12-22 20:54 UTC
As far as RHEL release schedules go, your guess is as good as mine since I can only go with publicly available information but it appears that release schedules are only very roughly time based and more determined by customer demand and updates in the point releases has been deemed sufficient till whenever Red Hat gets to a do a new release.
With additional subscriptions based on same product which extends updates for a point release as well as extending the lifecyle itself to 10 years, there is enough work within a release to not spread the effort too thin between multiple releases. Seems sensible to me but I am not a neutral source or worse,a industry analyst ;-). If you are a customer with different opinions, get in touch with your point of contact and let them know.
Edited 2008-12-22 21:40 UTC
Yes. Red Hat has their work cut out for them, meeting all these commitments. And the Red Hat team does take its promises seriously. Not making commitments that they can’t keep is laudable. The 18 to 24 month thing has been implied since about 2.1, I think. But if that is changing, we can live with it. I neglected to mention that we use CentOS. So I try to be careful about criticizing the upstream, which does a damn fine job, even if I really *would* like a middle of the road distro with a 12 month release cycle and 18-24 months of support. (Hey, it’s Christmas!)
-Steve
Edited 2008-12-22 21:57 UTC
If there is a truly a demand for such a option, probably something based off Fedora might be a better deal. There should a community of contributors willing to extend the updates beyond what is offered. There are some but not enough critical mass I suspect. Fedora Legacy died a slow death but maybe things are different now. I suspect, people who want it are only in wishlist mode rather than in participatory mode at the moment. Would be interesting to see if that changes. I might even join the effort.
I doubt it’s in the cards.
Fedora Legacy died a quick death. It just took a while to get through the denial phase. At this point, if a group of people did get together, without official Red Hat support, claiming to be committed to extending Fedora support, no one would believe them, anyway. Besides that, our Christmas wish list includes stable (not bleeding edge) releases and not just longer support.
Ubuntu LTS has been on my radar. But the Red Hat family of OSes gets so much *right* for multiuser boxes that I hesitate in actually moving my XDMCP servers to it.
I’ve learned to live with the fact that there isn’t a Santa Clause. 😉
Edited 2008-12-22 22:20 UTC
Red Hat has a great business model, they are really making it easier to support Enterprise servers without being forced into a upgrade route.
I am presently supporting Centos servers, however we will be going to the RHEL for the fact of the support and using some of the packages in Red Hat’s channel like mod_jk that is available via the Application Stack channel.
I run Centos and Fedora on my workstations/laptops and I like RHN, it has so much functionality and it is easier to work with. It is hard to be Red Hat, they are really in their infancy with how far they can take the distro. I started out with store bought Red Hat Professional 6.0 that had 1-800 phone support for 30 days. A hobby turned into a career, I would have never have thought a ‘free OS’ would turn into a good career.
Just my thoughts…