SuSE Going For Red Hat's Market 114
IAEBG writes "SuSE Linux has enlisted the backing of server-software maker Veritas, an important step in supporting the needs of business computing and keeping up with top Linux seller Red Hat.
Check out the article on News.com." Interesting step - now to see how it all pans out.
Veritas is bad news! (Score:5, Interesting)
- The documentation doesn't tell you this, but if you choose to have quick backups, then you get very slow restores.
- Our restore rate was about 1 megabyte per second.
- Veritas would crash after restoring only a few gigabytes, requiring us to restart where we left off, only for it to crash again after a few gigabytes. This resulted in a few gaps in the restore.
- Veritas uses some proprietary format on tape, making it impossible for us to get at the data some other way so that we could write scripts to check what was restored and what was not.
- Veritas support is prohibitively expensive.
- We were down for a week because of this horrible software.
Go SuSe!! (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems to me that a little more competition for RedHat in the server market is a good thing. The stronger (in the form of backing by large compagnies)the competition, the stronger the perception that Linux in the server room is a viable option.
Remember that SuSe is connected to the German goal of designing a groupware server for large work-groups. Seems SuSe is making quite a line-up of products for in the basement of large compagnies.
Re:As a real sysadmin (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course there is. Not only is there a way, it's being done right now. Witness the recent addition of extents to ext3, and the (newly revived, IIRC) tux2 phase tree filesystem. See also the huge advances that have been made in the Linux LVM. Yes, Veritas is ahead of the pack at the moment. But they're catching up every day, and Veritas don't have a sustainable product offering[1] in the long term, in the same way that Sun is starting to feel the pinch from Linux. Yes, the low end tends to be laughed at by the high end players. But over time, the low end gradually acquires more and more features until it's on a par with the mid range and eventually high end. Elements within Veritas already know this, but whether management do is another matter entirely.
[1] Veritas have three main products: Foundation Suite (that is, VxFS and VxVM), clustering and backups. Of those, the first two are definitely under mid term threat from free alternatives.
Re:RH still seem 'better for business' (Score:5, Interesting)
Really? I got an email from red hat threatening to take me to collection for non payment. I had not even gotten one other communication, snail or email, from them preceeding this (I check my junk mail and save every piece of it, in part, for this very reason). I call up and uncharacteristically don't blow my top but ask if they have been having billing issues. Turns out that I did owe them money, a cc had expired on an auto rebill, but he did acknowledge that I did not know about it and that they had taken their system offline for over two months (for an upgrade... hmmm) and the system just picked up from where it believed it should be at that point and not from where it had left off. Businesses don't need crap like that.
I am really glad to have an alternative to RH in this space. Linux is about alternatives and there have not been viable ones for some time in the Business space in linux. This should help and I can assure you in a year when I plan on upgrading, I will be checking out SuSe.
Re:As a real sysadmin (Score:4, Interesting)
There's no way, no how that they could write a volume manager or filesystem product that's even in the same league with VxFS and VxVM.
Because they are GODS who brought down REVEALED TRUTH from the MOUNTAIN OF SYSADMIN GOODNESS...
No way/no how? Pshaw. First, Veritas VxFS and VxVM are not the only products in this space - AIX ships with volume managers and file systems that are just as nice and so do other Unices. Second, they are not terribly complicated products. All they really add is another layer of indirection. And third, there are filesystems for Linux written by IBM/SGI/other people who've been to the mountain (VM isn't quite there yet)
BTW, Veritas system products are generally a pain because they're a third-party add-on. That is one thing I like about AIX and HP-UX - the LVM is integrated.
The clustering product is also very, very robust.
VCS is nice but over-priced. Again, not the only player (though one of the better ones).
Does anyone else here know what Foundation Suite is?
No - we are all fake sysadmins who can only play with Linux because we can't get real sysadmin jobs. Please, real sysadmin, come down from the mount and give us your wisdom.
(For those who really don't know, FS is just VxVM and VxFS bundled together. It's also a convenient way for Veritas to say "you have to buy this before you can buy other stuff, even if you don't need it, because, like, it's the FOUNDATION, man")
FS is an over-priced remedy for Sun's defects. It's a hidden tax on every Solaris system. It has little penetration outside of Solaris because other operating systems come with their own "full volume management solutions" (thereby leveraging value-added synergistic paradigms to provide excellent enterprise ROI).
FS is a nice product but I do not genuflect before it.
This is for real volume management, real disk replacement, real mirroring/striping/etc.
Real, real, real, dammit! REAL! Not that fake stuff you fake sysadmins are doing! I'm talking my REAL stuff!
I hate to tell you this, but there is plenty of "real" storage management done outside the Sun/Veritas world: AIX, HP-UX, mainframes, AS/400, and...gasp...Linux, sometimes without Veritas!
Having seen different products, and knowing Veritas far more intimately than I want to, I can't say that Linux + Veritas would be my preferred combo.
And VxFS is probably the most kick-ass filesystem I've ever used. The journaling alone is just fantastic, and the speed.... damn, it's fast. Even better, using Quick I/O....
I have nothing against VxFS - a fine product. But hardly manna from heaven. A filesystem design has to be one of the most easily commoditized pieces of IT.
Real businesses trust their data to real companies. Veritas is one of 'em.
Yeah, I work in a "real" business and having had "real" experience with Veritas I can tell you that they are a "real" pain in the ass.
Veritas is a sick company. Their support has nosedived and their products of late have been orders of magnitude less reliable than years ago.
To sum up: Veritas is just a software company, not the messiah.
Veritas Marketing Ideas (Score:2, Interesting)
No, you can't use the older version on that OS, you'll need to upgrade to the version that costs 10x more.
Veritas lost all respect when they shoved a new version of Backup Exec down my throat. Version 7 refused to run on Windows 2000. It even had checks built into the installer to make sure you wouldn't run it on Windows 2000. It had more checks to make sure you couldn't fake the OS version to bypass the check.
Guess what, after hours of tinkering, it ran, and worked. All this, just to do a remote backup of a few important shares.
Veritas - Good Products - Huge Pricetag (Score:2, Interesting)
I've been using Veritas in my shop for over 6 years, and I have to say, the Foundation suite is a great product. However, the pricetag has been going through the roof over the past 3 years. The core prices are going up, and they keep seperating out components and then selling them as "add-ons".
Veritas NetBackup still isn't a great system, it's miles behind what OmniBack II from HP does, unfortunately HP Never ported the Cell Server to anything besides HP.
While it might not be so bad if I spend $40,000 on a Filesystem when I spent $1.5Mil on the server, I don't think someone spending $50,000 for a server will want to spend $20,000 on the VM & FS.
Re:Market (Score:3, Interesting)
Here in lies the rub when talking about markets. There is the OS market, then there's the US OS market, it gets broken down all over the place (especially when talking about market share, like any other statistic the presenter has quite a bit of wiggle room to present their point of view).
As a US computer junky, I can tell you that in my local CompUSA, there are only 2 boxed, retail versions of Linux. They are Red Hat and SuSE, so on some playing fields (markets) they are competing head-to-head.
As far as a market share, and who has the most installs - I would agree that Red Hat is dominating in the US and SuSE in the EU.
I worked in a shop that ran Dell. As part of the Dell Server Assistant install (at the time at least) you had your choice of Windows NT4, Windows 2000, and Red Hat of assisted OS installs. SuSE wasn't an option and because RH and Dell had a 'relationship', SuSE wasn't even in the game. This is why their partnership with Veritas is so important. As more hardware manufactures and software vendors certify more then just Red Hat, the consumers get more choices and as we know, competition breeds better products.
Re:It's about time! (Score:3, Interesting)
Veritas is like that. Either you get to live with it or you take a hard long look at the more free replacements.
You can live without Veritas today. I most definitely dont want it included in RedHat. The alternatives like LVM are far more worthwhile to pursue (And more in line with RedHat's tendency to prefer freely distributable software in the distribution. Which is one of the main reasons that RedHat has a far bigger marketshare than SuSE does).
Distro-specific (Score:3, Interesting)
What does that mean to me? A lot of hardware comes touted as "supports linux," but when you really get down to it and read the accompanying docs, it means "supports RedHat" or "supports SuSe" and not any others without large amount of hassle. Because of this, it just gets harder for other distros to gain power or popularity in the market, because of the old cycle (and where have we heard this before): users won't use it 'cause it doesn't work (well/easily) on their hardware. Vendors won't fully support it until the user-base increases.
I'd like to see SuSe trim the edges off RedHat a bit, and hopefully some of the distros catch up as well (Debian, or debian-based such as knoppix/morphix). If there were at least a few more major players in the linux market, perhaps we might see more source or at least non-packager-specific (RPM) drivers/etc.
Re:The Microsoft conspiracy angle... (Score:4, Interesting)
Ever stopped to consider how much money is in this segment? How important it is to have a backup solution which is secure, scalable and trustable in a million bussiness?
The fact that Veritas bought up the backup part of Seagate's software and that they have strong ties with Windows doesn't mean that they are up to some "sly" stuff... As a matter of fact, i couldn't think of anything for that matter.
They see an emerging market, Linux, which is needing strong products to back it up in corporate userland. Any company would immediately jump to it.
It's not as if they never supported any other kind of OS. They have supported (and still do) Novell Netware next to Windows. Their agents are available for different Unix versions (including Linux for some time now, databases (oracle and SQL server), messaging systems (Exchange and Lotus Notes) and many other corporate tools. Many of which compete directly with MS software. Oh.. by the way, they also boast the fact that they surpassed Microsoft in supplying clustering and availability products. [veritas.com] Not something you would expect from a MS serf would you?
Not interested (Score:3, Interesting)
Redhat GPL's their stuff. I can go to dozens of companies and buy cheap copies of Redhat, with only the name changed since Redhat does protect their name. Can't do that with SuSE.