HP To Sell And Support Red Hat Linux 236
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."
Linux not ready for the big iron? (Score:2, Interesting)
Big blue supports it, Dell supports it, and now HP is supporting it. More and more, sounds to me like its taking the Microsoft and Unix world by storm.
makes you wonder what they'll do with HP-UX... (Score:4, Interesting)
Sounds like "pi*sing in the company soup"
HP already has a unix though (Score:3, Interesting)
I guess I could see them doing it for a number of reasons, mainly because it would be a gateway into the small/medium sized business market.
I'm glad to see this (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A hardware monopoly (Score:5, Interesting)
Or will it just be an obscure option burried in their website?
What happened to Debian? (Score:2, Interesting)
I remember reading articles about HP picking Debian because it was non commercial and the most stable disto out there.
beware of smoke and mirrors (Score:1, Interesting)
Just my 2 cents
Free? (Score:2, Interesting)
Worried... what does this do for x86-64 support? (Score:5, Interesting)
HP co-owns the IP for Itanium with Intel, so they have a vested interest in seeing Itanium get lots of support, and AMD x86-64 get none. RedHat has already announced Itanium versions of Advanced Server [redhat.com], but AFAIK, has been silent on the x86-64 front.
SuSE has announced [suse.com] long ago that they'd release x86-64 versions of their distro to coincide with Opteron's release, and they seem to be actively involved [x86-64.org] with that process.
Am I being paranoid here? Or does it look like RH might not support the most cost-effective 64bit platform going? Not all of us have deep pockets for I2.
Don
my smug mug is on smugmug [smugmug.com]
There is actually a good message here (Score:3, Interesting)
The real surprise: HP, $2 billion in Linux revenue (Score:5, Interesting)
What left me semi-stunned (until I regained my natural skepticism) was the following sentence:
Today's announcement builds on our $2 billion in Linux-based revenue in 2002 and our decade of commitment to the open source and Linux communities," said Peter Blackmore, executive vice president, HP Enterprise Systems Group. (emphasis mine.)
Where the heck does HP get this figure from? (And if VA Linux couldn't make it in the Linux hardware biz, how come HP is making $2 billion revenues just a couple years later?)
"Sniff test" problems here... but I wouldn't mind being enlightened by someone from HP.
--LP
Re:What happened to Debian? (Score:3, Interesting)
As a huge HP reseller customer don't even get me started on what an evil bitch Carly is.
Re:HP already has a unix though (Score:5, Interesting)
Answer: cheap R&D. HP can leave the development to someone else and focus its efforts on sales. HP is sure to have RedHat's ear when it wants it too. You have to figure that they see the writing on the wall: open source can do what the big boys do and sometimes can do it better. This move helps preserve their hardware sales a la Apple with OSX. Smart. Selling software anymore seems like selling ice to eskimos.
Re:What about laptops? (Score:2, Interesting)
Not to me, I know a few people who do graphic design, and having that kind of horsepower in a laptop is absolutely necessary to them.
A high end laptop and a docking station is also more cost/space effective than a high end desktop and a low end laptop. There are a lot of people who need/want such a portable PC.
The fact that you dont need or want something obviously means nothing. They sell like hotcakes and HP/Dell/Compaq/Sony rake in the dough hand over fist selling 'em.
(Why the heck anyone needs a 4 MHz Transmeta CPU in a linux based laptop is a mystery to me)
Re:A hardware monopoly (Score:0, Interesting)
Re:What about laptops? (Score:2, Interesting)
Why not? (Score:2, Interesting)
I thought the enemy of my enemy was my friend or some such. Works GREAT for U.S. foreign policy! ;-)
Why don't IBM, HP, SUN et al just throw together a good entry-level common distro and give it away just to GUT Microsoft ? Are they afraid the DOJ will sue them for collusion?!!
Any money to be made on Linux is all in the support.
Re:What about laptops? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have already said this [slashdot.org], but this announcement is not aimed at selling Linux on HP hardware to Joe consumer. They are selling/supporting the Entrerprise versions of RedHat that are aimed at corporate accounts.
Re:What about laptops? (Score:4, Interesting)
That doesn't mean that corporate laptop users won't want to run Linux. At where I work, we're beginning a rollout to move some of our servers to Linux. Seeing as I'm often on-site at our subsidiaries doing support work, my laptop is my primary PC. However, I'm also going to be one of the primary people supporting Linux, so I'd like to have a "best of both worlds" solution where I have a laptop that runs Linux. I know my boss is trying to get approval for a new laptop for me; it'd make getting me a laptop easier if we could find a manufacturer like Dell or HP/Compaq who sells machines with Red Hat pre-installed.
Just my $.02...
Re:The real surprise: HP, $2 billion in Linux reve (Score:5, Interesting)
Where the heck does HP get this figure from?
ISTR HP snagged a huge Linux deal at Dreamworks [com.com] last year. And they also scored a big Linux deal at Disney [theregister.co.uk].
The entertainment industry (especially the movie industry) are ironically moving to Linux big-time. The visual effects industry essentially told all their tools suppliers to port to Linux or else. The tools vendors have complied. Expect to see tasks that were traditionally done on SGI or Sun machines to be done pretty much exclusively on Linux machines from now on.
James Cameron pretty much set the tone for Linux in Hollywood with the renderfarm he used for Titanic [imdb.com]. That farm was built with Digital Alpha processors, but instead of buying DEC Unix (or Tru64 or whatever it was called then), his effects guys put Linux on the machines and saved a couple of hundred grand.
I find it endlessly amusing that Hollywood is so staunchly in support of intellectual property rights, but is more than willing to enjoy the benefits of Linux.
Very, very, very bad move for RedHat (Score:2, Interesting)
Apparently, complaints about support have skyrocketed 50% in ONE QUARTER!
Register story [theregister.co.uk]
Its the same game IBM and Solaris are playing (Score:2, Interesting)
I think even SGI did this, roll out Linux along their own OS for servers. No complaints from us but, I wonder why dont they offer BSD as well, just for more diversity in their offerings? They shouldnt make much money from Linux as an OS, so they could do that.
Well it's no surprise (Score:2, Interesting)
The project thats working on it has been trying to get info from Red Hat concerning their High availability product but has been stonewalled rumor is that RH is afraid of the support commitment.
The only down side to us using linux is that I'm 99% sure that any developments that we make in house would not be given back to the Linux project. I only give them 1% credit because there are a lot of Open Source advocates there that would let something slip anon if they could. But I imagine most corporations would be stingy like that.
Anyhow some dedicated Linux users are working on the project to bring it to our company and if this happens it will be a huge blow to MS down the road because other companies in the industry watch what we do.
The first stage is to use them as file and print servers. We currently have about 17000 remote locations with at least 1 server each and all of those are NT. would be quite a coup.
Re:The real surprise: HP, $2 billion in Linux reve (Score:3, Interesting)
Even worse for DEC/Compaq, they weren't really DEC Alphas, but Alpha clones. Was weird to see them rave about this "Titanic made using Alpha technology", when they didn't use DEC hardware or software, just use Alpha chips from someone else. They may have got a few bucks on Alpha licensing for those clones, but they had to really search for that silver lining in that storm cloud.
Re:What about laptops? (Score:3, Interesting)
Portable Maya Machine. I currently carry my desktop to my night job so I can have the ponies for doing 3D work that my Sony Vaio 505FX just can't handle (in fact, maya doesn't even run on it). I'd like to grab a laptop because it would greatly simplify the breakdown/portability issues that carrying a mid-tower case and monitor around pose. The Alienware top-end machine would be a godsend (and yes, I plug it in at work.. I realize that the battery life sucks, but hopefully I'd only have to rely upon the battery as a built-in UPS for saving/shutting down if the power goes out).
THen again, you are posing a rhetorical question to a forum that thinks putting linux on a toaster is cool, so I'm sure there are other unusual circumstances here. Now, if you were to repose it as "why would joe average" need a 2 Ghz laptop, I'd say "no reason at all". This is why I would prefer to buy a nice iBook for everyday tasks. Great battery life, quick enough to do email and webbrowsing...
HP Not So Great (Score:3, Interesting)
Did I mention that IBM brought a full rack of working blades with redhat, windows 2k, openbsd, freebsd, suse, and a few other linux distros, and showed off the awesome power? HP brought two broken blade servers and pointed at the Xeon's inside and said, "Intel! Intel!"
Not saying its bad to see Red Hat get exposure, but HP doesn't rate high in my book, and I know a lot of other people who feel the same way. This might give Red Hat a bad name.
If my HP sales rep is reading, this is why everytime you send me a new offer, I go right to my customers and say, "IBM! Pro Micro!"