Top Dell executives disparaged the “big iron” approach of building large, powerful servers on Tuesday–a dig at rivals IBM, Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard. Red Hat needs to lower its prices, or risk losing customers to free versions of the open-source operating system, the Dell executive who oversees the partnership with the Linux seller said Tuesday.
Dell bashes ‘big iron’; Says Red Hat needs to lower prices
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Well I agree about the price of Red Hat. I’m surprised that people who are using Linux in business are nevertheless the type that seem to think there’s something magical about support you’ve paid for vs. support you haven’t paid for. Sure you might need to write some custom management stuff to run 300 Debian servers instead of 300 RedHat servers, but gee… add up the support fees of those 300 RedHat servers and you’ve just hired some serious time and expertise. Those people will be far better support than RedHat will.
However… Dell is just mouthing off here. I find it annoying that they just kind of lash out like this. Even if they are partly correct, they aren’t being constructive about it at all. And as far as the big iron issue… I think they just are a bit upset that customers don’t always see it their way. I would have agreed with them more a few years ago, but virtualized machines are changing that. Now one ‘mainframe’-style system may be able to be, via virtual OS’s, 60 independent machines, with an awesome amount of management and money savings as a result. I think Dell is peeved that the big iron just might be back on the rise.
RedHat used to “own” the Linux market, but now I fear nobody would use Fedora for a production system and Enterprise is way too expensive.
I’ve seen many longtime RedHat users switch to Debian or even FreeBSD for servers.
I do prefer RHEL 3ES to SLES 9 though….
I’ll always go with Fedora for my desktop (hated SUSE Pro) but for servers, I’m currently using Slackware (and legacy RedHat 9).
If you just need the software minus the support go download and use centos from centos.org. its exactly the same software
of course they do… they can not build it with off the shelf commodity parts, so they cannot sell it, so they hate it.
not to mention, if some moron read that and replaced their 64 way IBM Main Frame with 32 high end Dell servers and networking equipment, Dell makes a lot of money and the customer is living in hell.
If you have 300 licenses you want to purchase, I would be very surprised if RedHat wouldn’t make a deal with you.
And the support costs are worth it for some things…
It’s really about comparable to the other non-free solutions; they are still in business for a reason. A price drop might seriously boost sales for them though; although I think a very low support plan is really the ticket they’re missing. Something like a $50 a year e-mail only support plan.
Theyre quite happy to Sell Windows Server products at comparable prices, and bend over backwards not to support things that clearly offer good value and excellent performance for Linux OS users e.g. AMD64.
Dell is no friend of mine when it comes to servers (their support is simply a nightmare and their hardware was pretty shoddy too.), and i’m certainly not about to listen to anything they have to say when it comes to OS advocacy.
Yes, it is so dead… that last year IBM sold more mainframes that ever. I am afraid the closest you have ever come to workign with a mainframe is a few miles by virtue of driving near some data center.
In fact I am sure you have never even worked with an IBM workstation. Jezus tap dancing on a stick… dell better than IBM gear, I mean… you trolls surelly don’t try hard anymore. *sigh*
Red Hat’s not really interested in the small-medium business market, because it’s far less lucrative than enterprise, and, frankly, they’ve got their hands full as it is.
However, when people talk about “writing management software” to compete with RHN[1], you’ve just gotta laugh. RHN’s AMAZING. You’d have to hire a few dozen people for two years to write up something even remotely comparable. The open source world has tried to replicate it, and failed miserably.
If you need to manage 300 servers, paying $300 a server is only $90,000 a year. Three comptent IT guys will run you $100,000 plus benefits and other costs (costing the company more like $160,000). Using RHN, one guy can EASILY maintain the software on all those servers.
Yes, if you’ve got a couple dozen boxes, RHN makes no sense. But then again, that’s not the market Red Hat is in at the moment.
And using some knockoff of RHEL isn’t going to get you 24/7 phone support with Red Hat’s engineers. For companies who have real needs, that kind of support is a bargain at $300 a year per server.
-Erwos
[1] RHN is NOT just up2date. Go do some research before telling me how “apt-get” is better. It’s not the same thing, at all.
dell is a commodity builder. Not a Big Iron builder. IBM supports those Mainframes for 25+ years (parts, service, upgrades, etc etc). dell can’t even provide parts for computers that are 3 years old. If dell thinks you are going to run a bank, telecom, or other high availability environments on commodity parts they are seriously deluded. dell may get 95% of the market that does not need high availability (in terms of hardware here – not software) but there will always be 5% to 7% of the market that requires reliable hardware and the 20 year support contract. There is not a chance in hell (right now) that dell is going to get those contracts.
I also think dell is pissing on big-iron because they are pissed that IBM sold their PC group to Lenovo, and I predict there will be an enusing price battle for the PC market. Chinese companies are _amazing_ at cutting costs and building to scale. IBM took a business that they could not run and gave it to a Chinese company – dell just got handed some very very big competition. This is a broad generalization, but Chinese people will probably not give business to an American company if their own (Chinese based) company can sell the computers for the same price!
Remember, IBM still has an 18% stake in the PC group. If IBM sees that Lenovo is failing to compete with Dell, IBM would divest itself of the 18.9% and put that money into other areas. It is quite cognizant of IBM to realize that the PC market is becoming commoditized and that coroporate America is more than happy to pay for a dell computer they can throw away 2 years later. Machine management is actually becoming quite expensive and their virtualization knowledge is top notch. Would you rather pay one person $150K to management a 32-cpu box made of high quality parts that can be partitioned into 320 machines or hire a staff of 4 IT people at $60K each to manage 320 seperate machines made out of crap parts? obviouslly small companies don’t have to money to but large boxes, but very large companies are going to move towards virtualization.
The previous anti-RedHat post wasn’t mine. I’d “Report Abuse”, but its not obvious from the post that its a troll.
From the article:
>>Dell prefers clusters of lower-end systems linked over a >>high-speed network.
So it is wrong to use some IBM mainframe using UNIX (they clearly attacked this), but it is okay to use a bunch low-end Dell systems with cluster Linux (*NIX).
Funny, very funny. But dont get it twisted. All these companies only care about one damn thing: making money. Even if they have to sell their souls or bend over and…. (Dell, IBM, Sun, Red Hat, Microstolen :-)……they are all the same).
Laughing…
While they’re at it, perhaps Dell should tell Novell, SuSE, and other top level Enterprise Linux vendors to lower their prices.
Don’t forget Microsoft too!
Is there a free version of “big iron” linux/unix?
Heh… Sure it is. You’ve visited the IT department in your local airline or bank recently, have you? 🙂
I have to agree that Dell is not a reliable provider of service or support. We use Dell Optiplex SFF systems with the removable CD/Floppy drives for workstations and have standardized on Dell servers. We have not been impressed. We order 150 new PC’s in the last year and had a 20% hard drive failure rate. The Dell support techs were so retarded that after sending the wrong replacement drives 2 times (full size drives do not fit, not matter how many times they insist they will) we had to actually send photos inorder to get the correct parts. 3 of 8 new servers needed replacements:new hard drives, motherboards and RAM. Their onsite server techs didn’t inspire confidence either, he fried 1 motherboard and another 2 dimms of RAM, but not before proclaiming “Whoooa. Can you imagine playing Doom on this thing!”
$2k/year/cpu is on the extremely ridiculous side of things. They are going to run themselves out of business. They are driving people to discover free as in “free beer” solutions like FreeBSD and Debian. RedHat Linux, for all intents and purposes, is proprietary, not in actuality but in perception. Most company only trust RedHat Linux, so it is the only choice. They have some kind of fear of Gentoo, Debian and the other distros. However, because RedHat has placed the prices so high, managers are going to start risking building their infrastructure on Debian and FreeBSD and they are going to start liking the result. They are going to find that they have the same openness as RedHat, the same support, the same stability, at the great price of free. And this will act like a snowball, with more and more people switching over as they grow in popularity as proven platforms. Then RedHat will not be able to lower their prices because they are competing against free beer. RedHat doesn’t have any choice but to make their distribution affordable and to go for mass market adoptation. My suggestion to RedHat is to give some kind of basic site service license where people can download unlimited patches for unlimited system, not get any phone or email support, and only pay a flat fee. This is the only way they will be able to compete against SuSE, Debian, FreeBSD, and Solaris. People are afraid to use other forms of Linux and RedHat should do their best to keep it that way. The only way they can do it is by making it so cheap that it isn’t worth the risk for people to do that.
Support subscriptions start at $349. Now, that said, I do feel there is a gap that needs to be filled between Fedora and the current RHEL offerings for people who only want or need 30 days of installation support and security updates for more than 18 months.
I do feel there is a gap that needs to be filled between Fedora and the current RHEL offerings for people who only want or need 30 days of installation support and security updates for more than 18 months.
That gap I think RedHat thinks is filled by toher distros. They are going for a high-margin low volume game; leave the barrel scraping to some other distro.
It’s called CentOS – RHEL minus the cash and logos.
Is there a free version of “big iron” linux/unix?
Yes. If you don’t have the hardware and are curious, go and get an emulator;
http://www.conmicro.cx/hercules
Look around the site for details and links to other related sites. They should point you in the right direction.
Support subscriptions start at $349. Now, that said, I do feel there is a gap that needs to be filled between Fedora and the current RHEL offerings for people who only want or need 30 days of installation support and security updates for more than 18 months.
Look here; http://www.redhat.com/apps/commerce
That’s retail with different levels of support. Wholesale is cheaper on a per-unit basis. For the base systems, I can’t see how to add advanced support beyond what they offer as part of the initial purchase.
they can see that between managing 10,000 PC based servers vs 1 mainframe – there clear winner is big iron. (based on real life example – think big insurance company) there was a point it in time it looked like PCs may pose a threat, but that time is rapidly vanishing and so is any hope that DELL will be profitable in 5 years. milking what they can before it all falls down…
To be fair, I must saz that redhat support has been below pathetic.
And those 300 bucks per license are NOT for support, just patches. I can get patches from Sun for free, not to mention that support licenses are cheaper and support is incomparablz better.
When Dell talks about “big iron”, they seem to forget about big iron features like hardware based virtualization, where a machine can be partitioned into smaller parts based on function. For exmple Sun sells the SunFire 6800 as a “cluster in a box”, the machine has two separate electrical grids. I am sure that there are similar offerings from IBM and HP.
Also with operating systems that support virtualization (Solaris Zones, AIX LPARs, HP-UX Vpars), the only limits to creating “servers on demand” is the amount of hardware. If Dell wants to compete with big iron, then it needs to design and build big iron as opposed to selling clustering as their only way to solve large scale computing problems.
Sun provides hardware virtualization via dynamic system
which support full physical partitioning (electrical and
bus isolation). You also have redundant components and
virtually everything is hot swappable without taking the
OS down. With Solaris10 there is also full software
partitioning. Combined, it’s a pretty good virtualization
solution. IBM support logical component virtualization
in a software/firmware abstraction called the hypervisor.
It’s also a very good solution but with the downsides of
a greater performance penalty (remembering with the p5 they
have performance to burn so this is probably a non-issue
for now) and, more significantly, no electrical isolation.
x86 servers are useful in a lot of places but not where
something just has to keep running. This is why big iron
costs so much.
Well WS, which I had forgotten about, is in the price range I’m talking about. Does anyone have any experience using this as a server OS? i.e. after the install, you have a desktop, but no mysqld, httpd, sendmail, etc. What happens if you:
up2date httpd mysql-server sendmail
Does it work, or is it in a seperate channel with only desktop packages?
What other gotchas might there be?
I’m not really asking for myself or my clients since I’m happy as a clam with FC3, but I do recognize the need.
At any rate, I think that the only version of EL that Dell preinstall is the $349 ES. I really, really like RedHat. They are a great company in many ways. But they are starting to give some people the impression that Linux is just as expensive as Windows. Sun has already jumped on that, and I expect MS to crank up the volume soon.
I’m lost as to what Dell is comparing the “overpriced” RHES to? For the Enterprise version, its about $349 for only update support and $799 for updates + tech support.
What is so costly about this? Agreed, this is not something that an individual can afford, but if the business you are working at cannot afford $349 – then they really don’t need a server, IMHO. Or alternatively, they need to manage all the updates themselves / rely on the OSS community. I’m not slaming either alternative, but there is no free lunch.
Furthermore, at my office, we have 165 employees connecting to 2 RHES for everything from File/Print to Email/Proxy/VPN. The total cost for the software was $1600. Compare and contrast that cost to Win2003 / Exchange2000 with proper licenses.
That $1600 is about what a janitor makes here per MONTH…..why would anyone claim that this is alot of money is beyond me….
What do Dell really do anyway???
They don’t make the main processor chips, Intel does.
They don’t make the Operating system, MS does.
Just what do they make anyway? Dell cases..
What about the motherboards?
What Dell does is provide low-cost hardware to consumers. They do this by optimizing the back-end logistics so the overhead is minimal.
Unfortunately, this means they can’t do a lot of R&D. Ther’s no return in R&D in this model. What Dell calls R&D most other companies call Quality Assurance and Testing.
That’s fine for what it is, and there’s nothing wrong with what Dell does. It’s been immensely successful.
Let’s see if they can compete with the Chinese, who can afford to pay their people $1/day. Moving assembly to China may get some better pricing, assuming that’s where the components are manufactured (less shipping). Optimize that, Dell!
Yes, it is too much. Other than being able to run Oracle, what advantage does RedHat have over other distributions? I personally have extensively used Debian and FreeBSD in addition to RedHat. I didn’t bother to use them until RedHat came up with their Fedora/Enterprise plan. RedHat gave me no choice, it was either pay 15 x $800 or get something free. There is a big difference between $12,000 / year versus free. I can’t justify paying that much for an OS when I can get one that is almost exactly the same but free. If RedHat sold some kind of enterprise site license at a more affordable rate, I would be able to make a case for using RedHat. But they didn’t, and I had incentive to find an alternative. And what I found is that there are some really good alternatives.As it stood, my manager’s were wondering why we don’t use Windows more.
Slash – I’m confused?
You had 15 servers that you wanted full tech support on? or just wanted access to the updates ($800 vs $349)?
On those 15 servers, what would the cost (properly licensed) have been for Win2k or 2003? Were any of them running mail / DB servers? Again how much for MS equivalents?
Of course there is a difference between $12000 and free. You are free to choose ‘free’ – its all open source. It’s just that Darwin will have a way of weeding such ignorance out of production environments.
What kind of business do you run? It seems clear that RHEL is not suitable for your enterprise if it is a small or medium size hence the existence of other alternative such as Whitebox or CentOS.
It looks like the problem is not RHEL but your lack of planning or bad managment.
You are free to forgo the support if you feel it is too expensive and support the system yourself for free.
If you feel there is a real market for cheaper enterprise linux support systems, well, i’d say theres a business opportunity staring you in the face.
Offer White Box Linux certification and support for $399 or something, and watch the money roll in.
One thing is for damn sure – you won’t get any useful support from Dell, no matter how much money you throw at them.
Sorry I’m replying so late, but it took a bit longer to find this than I thought. You have to find the list of RedHat mirrors.
Anywho, if you don’t want to continue paying for support or only wish to have security updates, then all you have to do is download and compile the security updates.
You can download from a RedHat mirror:
http://fedora.redhat.com/download/mirrors.html
With Enterprise updates in the predictable place.
Like, this one:
ftp://ftp.linux.ncsu.edu/pub/redhat/linux/updates/enterprise/3AS/e…
Now, RedHat won’t give you the binary packages, but are obliged to give you the source. Actually, if you’re not a customer, they don’t have to even do that (yes, as per the GPL). However, they’ve always released their source to the general public.
So, for each source rpm its a quick “rpm-build –rebuild; rpm -Uvh”. There’s yer updates.
I’m lost as to what Dell is comparing the “overpriced” RHES to? For the Enterprise version, its about $349 for only update support and $799 for updates + tech support.
Don’t forget that’s $349 *per year*.
I agree that’s not particularly expensive, however.
Furthermore, at my office, we have 165 employees connecting to 2 RHES for everything from File/Print to Email/Proxy/VPN. The total cost for the software was $1600. Compare and contrast that cost to Win2003 / Exchange2000 with proper licenses.
Again, don’t forget that will be $1600 *per year*. Also don’t forget to account for the time taken setting everything up.
We have a Select agreement here with some discounting attached, but have roughly the same amount of users so if you wanted you would be eligible for reasonably similar pricing. Our Windows Server+Exchange CAL cost is about AU$120 per user, so I’d guess it’s around the $80US/user mark. So your CAL cost would be about $13,200, or about $3,300 per year (assuming a 4 year system lifetime).
IMHO, Windows Server and Exchange will provide a much more integrated, easy-to-use and functional environment for running an office full of Windows desktops that justifies the extra expense. If, however, you don’t have an office full of Windows desktops then obviously YMMV
.
However, even $3,300/year is hardly “expensive” – equivalent to US$20/user/year – probably well under an hour’s average salary cost to the business.
re: Bryan S
“On those 15 servers, what would the cost (properly licensed) have been for Win2k or 2003? Were any of them running mail / DB servers? Again how much for MS equivalents?”
What you fail to see is that I could just as easily pay for Windows Server (~$800) or Windows Web Server (~$400) and use IIS, SMTP, or whatever to my heart’s content and not pay anything extra. The cost associated to Windows is CIFS and Exchange. If I wanted to, I can also choose to install Apache on them. If I need a database server, I will be free to install MySQL, PHP, or whatever on them too. $800 is my cost flat out.
re: Finalzone
“What kind of business do you run? It seems clear that RHEL is not suitable for your enterprise if it is a small or medium size hence the existence of other alternative such as Whitebox or CentOS. It looks like the problem is not RHEL but your lack of planning or bad managment.”
Whatever. The fact that you confuse RHEL for enterprise shows that you don’t know anything about enterprise. The fact is that I am running an OS that has free updates and is capable of doing everything you are doing, and I am running it for free. What exactly does RedHat do for me again? OH yeah, they give that nice comfy warm feeling. Sorry, but this nice, comfy feeling in my stomach isn’t worth $12,000 / year. I would say it’s worth about $40/year/system at most. I think a lot of people would agree seeing how this trend of moving away from RedHat is happening across the board.
I say within a year, RedHat is going to revisit their pricing model. And when they do that, you guys will get that nice, warm feeling in your stomachs knowing that you were wrong.
Slash –
Again, I dont think that I’m missing your point. *Of course*, you can run free software with no up-front cost. Or, choose to run Apache/MySQL on Win2K. No argument that will save you the yearly cost of support. No disagreement, but then you wind up with no support – save google and usenet.
However, your blanket statements of, “What exactly does RedHat do for me again? OH yeah, they give that nice comfy warm feeling.” You absolutely miss the point.
It’s not to give you a warm comfy feeling. Its that RedHat has certified that their distribution — including the version of Apache and MySQL included — will perform without show stopping bugs. And if a security flaw, or other bug shows up, they will release an update that addresses that.
Furthermore, have you looked at the features that RHN gives you. Particularly, the way we use it, we define classes of servers (ie. File/Print or Web/VPN) and we can manage those machines as logical groups from a central location. When we deploy a new machine, we assign it to the appropriate class, and volia – it automatically downloads all the needed packages and custom config scripts to be a “Web Server” or whatever class it falls in.
To think that by choosing to manage all this on a machine per machine basis, and worry about each individual version of software you have installed – and still maintain that there is no cost associated with that, is simply negligent.
So if you get hit by a bus, who does your company turn to support the exact implementation you’ve constructed and what does that cost them?
I’m not advocating that you buy RHES or anything else. I think you’ve made an understandable choice. But you fail to see that are shifting problems from one category to another. There is no free lunch.