A CIO's View of SUSE's Enterprise Viability

onehitwonder writes "As part of an ongoing quest to find a viable alternative to the Microsoft desktop in the enterprise, well-known healthcare CIO John Halamka spent a month using Novell SUSE 10 as his sole operating system. His conclusion? It's good enough for the enterprise. In Windows vs. Linux vs. OS X: CIO John Halamka Tests SUSE, he explains how SUSE stacks up against RHEL, Fedora, XP and OS X (in a life-critical business environment), and which issues should influence an enterprise-class organization to adopt it."

Now That's a Good Viewpoint

[nz17]

We've had everyone from HardOCP to grandmas post their opinion on the "best desktop system" issue, but I think someone with not only workers and an enterprise on the line, but the life-and-death of people on his hands, is really going to give an honest opinion. He doesn't want deaths on his hands either directly or from his recommendations. I think everyone reading this post should give the article at least a cursory glance before jumping to their own opinions.

These are NOT life critical...

[Creepy Crawler]

If anybody knows about medical tech, they do NOT run "laptops" or desktops on critical equipment.

The life-maintaining equipment runs only secure hardware, with mathematically proven code, and fiber-optic links for isolation (to prevent electrocution hazards). There was even a heart monitor someone made and posted to /. , and it would have likely killed someone as it had them hooked up to a computer serial port.

SuSE will NOT run on the dangerous equipment. It will run on the network as a "online chart". Many people should be against that as well, for altogether different reasons. This is somewhat critical, as most med groups run paper charts just in case..

Why listen to this guy?

[Anonymous Coward]

well-known healthcare CIO John Halamka

Most well known for being the responsible guy for one of the biggest hospital IT failures on the books. All hospital systems out for 4 days? What kind of good CIO has that kind of failure on his watch?

See http://www.medical-journals.com/r0313.htm [medical-journals.com]

Re:Authenticate into AD?

[DragonTHC]

you can add a suse computer into a windows AD very easily from within yast.

and samba does integrate tightly into AD. It can server as a PDC, BDC or standalone Fileserver.

Well Twitter,

[ColdWetDog]

I'm glad you read the article. Now go back and work on reading comprehension. He's looking for a desktop OS replacement. I've worked in health care for over 20 years and desktop computers don't run health critical systems.

Desktop computers ("PCs" in the vernacular) run things like, please excuse me if this raises your blood pressure, Microsoft Office, Windows Explorer, Outlook and Bugs Bunny wallpapers. The critical systems typically use an embedded OS (ventilators and other machines that go "ping") or they run some UNIX variant (CTs, MRIs).

I'm trying desperately to get our small hospital off of XP. All we run are the above "productivity" apps and a bizarre VT100 terminal program that talks to the billing / order entry / lab system. Any reasonable Linux system would be fine except that company that runs the back end system won't allow anything but this oddball emulator to talk to their system. (Don't even think of VMware or similar - that's much too complex for them).

But anyway, don't have a heart attack if you see the green and blue wavy fields on the screen at your local ER. It won't shock you.

Re:Why listen to this guy?

[cyphercell]

funny, for me when I clean up a Windows PC it's all about re-imaging the thing. Why? because once you run the AV, the Registry Cleaner, the ad-ware remover, blah blah blah, it's a ton quicker, cleaner, and safer just to re-image the damn thing. You can spend days on a Windows machine cleaning things up that are archaically crufty after just a year of use. Of course I may be dealing with a different class of user than you, but I feel that on a system that is as heavily targeted for attack as windows is, it almost requires a new image every year or so, I mean who knows what's on there that you can't find.

Actually ...

[Kristoph]

The conclusion of the article is that:

Though he personally is pleased with the OS, Halamka is not so sure he'd deploy it widely in his organization.

Although he apparently thought much more of SuSE then he did of RedHat, which is covered in this article:

http://www.cio.com/article/41140 [cio.com]

Incidentally, in that article (which is the actual comparison) he says the best OS is Mac OS X, although his favorite piece of hardware is a Dell?!?

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Re:Now That's a Good Viewpoint

[Nutria]

And some desktop tools use Gnome, which means they work best on Redhat.

Well that's just a load of crap.