HP To Sell And Support Red Hat Linux

Dman33 writes "Redhat Linux seems to be gaining an even stronger share in the server and workstation market as HP is announcing worldwide sales and support of the popular distro. Infoworld has a writeup on the announcement and the press release straight from HP is a good read regarding the initiative."

déjà vu

[gohai]

HP To Sell Custom High-Security GNU/Linux Distro [slashdot.org]
HP to give 24/7 support for Linux [slashdot.org]

seems not to be the first time...

Re:makes you wonder what they'll do with HP-UX...

[SquadBoy]

So you are also going through MPE/3000 end of life. :) I feel for you.

Yup MPE is still *huge* in some places. For example if you do business with a credit union there is a very good chance that they run on a HP 3000 and are working on moving to the HP 9000. And you are right that is not going away for a very long time.

Re:Linux not ready for the big iron?

[OrenWolf]

Not a problem. Advanced server offers a five-year minimum timeline for updates, and that's what they have certified - the three new flavours of Advanced server.

Re:Linux not ready for the big iron?

[0x0d0a]

Uh...I've used Red Hat for years. I download updates when they come out via apt-get, yum, manually when advisories come up on securityfocus...and the problem is that I don't get an email from Red Hat personally?

The subscription may be more than worth it to a business, but the consumer is hardly under any onus to purchase it.

Re:makes you wonder what they'll do with HP-UX...

[phoebus1553]

HP announced long ago that they were going to be supporting the next release of Pro/Engineer on Linux and that RedHat was their distro of choice. Pro/E was recently released to the people on service contracts (like us, we have copies here) so it is probably in their best interests to fill out their product line.

This is no doubt to make that official.

Re:A hardware monopoly

[irix]

Did you read the article?

"The Red Hat operating systems covered by this agreement include Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS, used in high-end servers for demanding tasks such as database and enterprise applications; Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES, used in smaller, departmental servers, such as mail, Web and print servers; and Red Hat Enterprise WS, used in workstations."

CompUSA will still just be selling HP home PCs bundled with WinXP home. This is for commercial accounts who want RedHat Linux with their HP servers or workstations and are prepared to pay for it.

Re:The real surprise: HP, $2 billion in Linux reve

[borroff]

Remember, HP isn't only hardware; they have a large share of the systems management software market (Openview), and a consulting group as well. If you count all the Openview agent licenses for Linux boxes (which aren't cheap), plus consulting income, plus embedded linux revenue, $2B seems within reach.

Re:Worried... what does this do for x86-64 support

[stratjakt]

HP is selling and doing phone support for Red Hat. They dont own Red Hat, conrol Red Hat, or any of the such.

If HP chooses only to sell Itanium based rigs, that's their perogitive. If you want a hammer-equiped red hat rig, dont get it from HP.

So just relax. This is just HP making sure the latest IT buzzword is prominent in their marketing literature.

Re:Worried... what does this do for x86-64 support

[onethumb]

Ok, I'm probably dumb and paranoid. :)

Found a press release [redhat.com] about it, afterall, so perhaps RedHat will still be supporting Hammer.

Let's hope so.

Don my smug mug is on smugmug [smugmug.com] ... is yours?

Re:The real surprise: HP, $2 billion in Linux reve

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, for one thing, our company bought a ton (think hundreds) of their $7,000 Linux workstations (Dual Xeon, 2 Gb Memory, yada yada). Plus 24x7x365 support anywhere in the world. It's a big contract that they got (definitely in the millions). I think they got a bunch of contracts for big Beowulf clusters too last year.

Plus, don't forget they now own Compaq. Compaq servers were being dished out a long time with Linux, so all of the Compaq servers with Linux were prob counted too. Let's not forget Alpha servers that shipped with Linux as well.

About the only bitch I had with HP was their workstations were shipping with RH 7.1. And it was a hideously nasty version of it too.

While I find $2 billion to be a bit on the high side, I could definitely see $1 billion just from digging through press releases & what not.

Re:makes you wonder what they'll do with HP-UX...

[Undertaker43017]

Actually the move to IA64 helps HP quite a bit on the OS side.

From a cost justification standpoint it makes no sense to port Tru64 or VMS to IA64, therefore they have brought their supported OS's down to Windows, Linux and HP-UX. HP-UX has already been ported and the other two HP doesn't have to pay for.

Certainly with Linux (and to a lesser extent, Windows) they may contribute to the effort (since they are co-designers of the architecture), but that really amounts to "lessons" learned from the HP-UX port, no "real" cost to them.

Re:makes you wonder what they'll do with HP-UX...

[stratjakt]

It was supposed to be gone by now, AFAIK, but there was enough customer backlash that HP extended support for the 3000 series for another 5 years.

We've committed to supporting our customers for another 5 years beyond HPs cut-off date. Of course, we're just itching to sell them all unix or NT (powered by Stratus) based replacements.

The 3000s just dont break, and for the types of systems we sell on 'em, they'd be perfectly adequate chugging along until the end of time. So luckily HP phases em out for us so we can make a lot of moolah replacing them, or supporting them at great costs.

HP also supported SUN

[Ultra Magnus]

In our company, HP is also aggressively trying to get us to switch our support for our SUN E class from sun to HP. We are suspicious, and asking lots of questions like when the blame game begins, but so far all their answers are sharp and quick, and their price is better than Sun's. Our management is seriously considering this switch, so a move to support linux would be seen as a good thing for companies trying to get over this "open source" support model.

Re:makes you wonder what they'll do with HP-UX...

[SquadBoy]

It was supposed to be the end of next year when I first heard about it but then it got changed to 2006. Of course I started in this business after the orginal end of life so your dates and mine could be the same just counting from two starting points. In any case yea we are selling an HPUX based HP 9000 solution and it is a *sweet* box.

This isn't really that new...

[DrEnter]

Actually, HP has been offering RedHat AS for their Itanium boxes for quite a while now, along with HP-UX and Windows 64-bit Enterprise Server (the price difference between HP-UX and Linux has always been negligable, but Windows adds substancially to the final system price). The only thing new here was the same Linux software and support is now being offered for the 32-bit Intel hardware.