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Linux Business Businesses Red Hat Software SuSE

SuSE Going For Red Hat's Market 114

Posted by Hemos from the gunning-for-the-top-dog dept.
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.
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SuSE Going For Red Hat's Market More

SuSE Going For Red Hat's Market

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  • Market (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 27, 2003 @08:49AM (#7318320)
    I'm pretty sure SuSE and Red-Hat were already in the same market.

    • Re:Market (Score:2, Informative)

      by mirko ( 198274 )
      "United" Linux [unitedlinux.com] I do not think so :
      The four partner companies in UnitedLinux LLC - Conectiva, the SCO Group, SuSE Linux and Turbolinux -- continue to support products powered by UnitedLinux Version 1.0 and customers deploying these products.
      No mention about Red Hat...

      • Re:Market (Score:3, Informative)

        by diersing ( 679767 )
        I think you have a gross conceptual error.

        Market - as in doing business in the same arena (the server/enterprise OS market in this example) SuSE and Red Hat are certainely competitors there.

        UnitedLinux was a marketing strategy to consolidate the distribution to battle the 'I can't run linux because I'm not sure which ones are good or which ones will be around' argument.

        I think this is a great deal for SuSE. For those Windows shops that may want to delve into the Linux world now at least have a choice of

        • Re:Market (Score:2, Informative)

          by IANAAC ( 692242 )

          Market - as in doing business in the same arena (the server/enterprise OS market in this example) SuSE and Red Hat are certainely competitors there.

          In the US, at least, SuSE and RH are most definitely NOT in the same market. When it comes to marketing toward businesses and enterprise, RH pretty much owns the market. You don't find ads (or anything else, for that matter) from SuSE targeting businesses. SuSE is, however, quite popular outside that market. I don't know about Europe, but I suspect tha

          • Re:Market (Score:3, Interesting)

            by diersing ( 679767 )
            Very true.

            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-hea
          • Hmmm, I still think they're in the same market (especially in light of RedHat dumping their community edition), just not the same market share.
            • especially in light of RedHat dumping their community edition

              I don't think it's quite fair to say they're dropping their community edition, any more than to say debian doesn't have a community edition. Red Hat Linux is being transitioned to a community model where volunteers maintain packages adhering to a community standard, and caling it Fedora Core. It will still have large involvement from Red Hat employees, too. We just won't get the free back-ported updates. Instead the volunteer maintainers will dec

              • This troubles me from the top of their web site [redhat.com]:

                "It is also a proving ground for new technology that may eventually make its way into Red Hat products."

                So it's now going to be a big test distro like Debian Unstable? I always thought RedHat CE was an excellent balance between bleeding edge and stability, but it appears now they will focus on bleeding edge. :(

                • well, that may be the case, but I don't think so. RawHide is and always will be the bleeding edge testing ground for Red Hat maintained packages. Fedora Core is merging with http://fedora.us, and will have various flavors, Core, Legacy, Extras, yadda yadda. It should be up to the volunteer package maintainers to work out a staging cycle. If you've never looked at fedora.us, you should have a peek. You'll notice that their apt repository has stable/testing/unstable. Given this tidbit, and the explicit mentio
      • This must be a bad thing- because you said SCO!
        I dont think I have ever played with TurboLinux.
        • Dont know why those angle brackets didnt come out- there was supposed to be "Knee Jerk" tags around that first line(it pays to preview).
    • Yes, they are in the same market, and perform both more or less decently. I'm a sysadmin who was a fan of SuSE for a long time, but I switched to FreeBSD after having been hugely disappointed by SuSE's pricing policy for end users when they introduced the Euro currency in Europe. Yes, this alone is not a sufficient criterion, but it sticked, I've since then helped convert many ten-thousands of computers in enterprises to FreeBSD (both from SuSE and RH and M$).
      And less than 0.5% of the users and local admins

  • Sun Plug (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Davak ( 526912 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @08:57AM (#7318369) Homepage
    I love the Sun plug found in the article:
    The new software will make it easier for Unix customers to adopt Linux, Haff said. "It makes that move from a lot of Unix systems, and from Sun in particular, easier than it was before," he said. Sun Microsystems' Solaris is the most widely used version of Unix and a prime candidate for companies that want to save costs by using Linux on less-expensive Intel-based hardware.

    However, being a Sun guy myself, I worry if this is this one more blow against Sun's unstable current position.

    Davak

  • The Microsoft conspiracy angle... (Score:5, Informative)

    by jkrise ( 535370 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @08:59AM (#7318380) Journal
    I remember that Veritas was one of the few companies that licensed MS filesystem and protocols. In fact, after Seagate, I think Veritas took over Backup Exec and the XP backup s/w.

    Now, what advantage does tying up with Veritas give a Linux distro firm? Backups? That should be a very minor market segment, even among Corporate users.

    Methinks, there's something sly going on over here.
    • Yes, they bought Backup Exec (and the non-crystal bits of Seagate Software). Veritas wrote Disk Manager for Win2K. They also wrote a replacement for NTFS that never saw the light of day. But don't forget that they built themselves on filesystems, volume management and clustering for unix boxen.

    • Re:The Microsoft conspiracy angle... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I work closely with Veritas (I design storage systems) and I can tell you that there is no bias at Veritas towards any specific operating system. They have created several parts of w2k / XP, but they also supply file systems for most of the *NIX systems.

      Also backup software (netbackup and backup exec) are one of the most important products that you can run in an enterprise network. Not trivial as you seem to suggest...
    • One advantage might be for a Windows shop who is a partner with Veritas, that is thinking of making the jump to linux to reduce some costs. Having a trusted partner (Veritas) come in and advise, maybe deploy (or at least work with them to deploy) would raise their comfort level. Once linux is in the datacenter and proving itself that company would be more likely and comfortable, in choosing a linux solution.
    • Now, what advantage does tying up with Veritas give a Linux distro firm? Backups? That should be a very minor market segment, even among Corporate users.

      Are you nuts? Backups are INSANELY important in corporate culture. Veritas is the most widely used backup product, and so one can tie in with the established backup system. The backup environment you already have serving your windows, sun, and etc systems - hey, now you can backup SuSE on it too.

      An OS has NO chance in a corporate environment if manage

    • I'd love to see a free tape reader that would let me read ntbackup tapes on linux.

      Yes, MTF can read some tapes, but I've ran into problems with it.

      As well, my final goal would be to read files done with ntbackup(backup to disk) under linux.

      Nobody seems to have done this so far though.
    • Now, what advantage does tying up with Veritas give a Linux distro firm? Backups? That should be a very minor market segment, even among Corporate users.

      Either 1) I don't understand what your talking about, or 2) you don't know what your talking about.

      I develop technology plans and consulting to small and medium sized businesses (Usually between 5 - 50 employees). Even in the smallest of companies, backups are mission critical, especially in sales, customers databases, accounting data, etc..

      Unfortuna

    • Re:The Microsoft conspiracy angle... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Diabolical ( 2110 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @10:51AM (#7319107) Homepage
      Now, what advantage does tying up with Veritas give a Linux distro firm? Backups? That should be a very minor market segment, even among Corporate users.

      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?
    • It was my understanding that Veritas partially wrote the NTFS filesystem for Micro$oft. I have heard this mentioned several times throughout the years. Curious if this isn't the case.
    • Hmmm... let's see if we can't reason this out...

      1) Backups are absolutely critical to the functioning of EVERY company, therefore every company needs a 100% reliable, enterprise backup solution.

      2) The more enterprise-level, commercial grade tools are available, the better the "sell" to non-techies (read "executives and pencil pushers")

      3) Veritas is owned by IBM.

      After a billion dollar commitment, a JFS port, and an ongoing three billion dollar lawsuit, I can't imagine why they'd want to broaden the popul

  • RH still seem 'better for business' (Score:5, Informative)

    by hughk ( 248126 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @09:07AM (#7318416) Journal
    Red Hat's enterprise server products have had good coverage and in general, it is seen as being better for business customers. I guess this is mostly because of their press coverage in the English speaking world. However, Suse is popular in Europe, particularly in Germany and this is an important step for them to be able to offer high-end solutions to the PHBs.

    Incidentally, Linuxworld Frankfurt is colocated with the European Banking World expo and conference. A ticket for one gets you into to the other. The Bankfest, is for serious PHBs and Linuxworld is offering a day on Linux in finance to attract "Cross-interest".

    In other news, Sun's shares (SUNW) were slighlty down. Having Veritas supporting both RH and Suse isn't good news for them.

    • support? (Score:2, Informative)

      by dphoenix ( 623525 )
      What's really going to matter to businesses is support. With Red Hat, they know they're getting a trusted support contract. That's the primary reason most businesses choose Red Hat.

      • Re:support? (Score:2, Informative)

        by Wudbaer ( 48473 )
        While this is true for the US, at least in Germany (at most likely also in other European countries) SuSE has a strong support and consulting presence.

        It's not accidential that the Munich Linux project as well as other larger Linux migration projects are backed by SuSE among others like IBM. Also in Germany large vendors like IBM or Fujitsu-Siemens work closely with SuSE. While Redhat still has a strong presence in Germany, SuSE is a premium choice for large Linux projects over here.

    • Re:RH still seem 'better for business' (Score:5, Interesting)

      by terraformer ( 617565 ) <tpb@pervici.com> on Monday October 27, 2003 @09:44AM (#7318617) Journal
      RH still seem 'better for business'

      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.


      • Businesses are used to "crap like that," actually.

        Alternatives are good, though. I just hope the Linux market stays sufficiently unified that ISVs will write software for it.

      • I am used to billing screwups and don't consider it a major issue when I receive such a bill. Usually a quick call and it is sorted. I have also had an issue with MS over and MSDN Universal subscriptzion (double billing, sorted after a quick call).

        However, forget RH and Suse direct. They are important, but not so much as the likes of HP and IBM who sell both their wares with their respective hardware and provide backup at a level (and price!). Some people will pay for the name and there is no IBM or HP Li

  • Going for Red Hat's market?? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Cooper_007 ( 688308 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @09:13AM (#7318447)
    At the moment I'm under the impression that SuSE parimarily targets European business whereas RedHat aims more for the US, so they're not really going for Red Hat's market. Please correct me if this is wrong.

    Aside from this, Red Hat and Suse are competitors. Of course Suse is going for Red Hat's market and you can rest assured that Red Hat is trying very hard to react in kind.

    Maybe someone should change the headline to "Suse signs a deal with Veritas"?

    Cooper
    --
    I don't need a pass to pass this pass!
    - Groo The Wanderer -

    • I don't have figures to back this up, but my impression is that the "Suse is European" thing is a bit simplistic. Just looking at the latest catalogue from a major German computer mail order company, also present in France, who edit several Linux magazines, and they offer a choice of Debian, Mandrake or Red Hat. No Suse. Sure, your average corporate customer isn't going to use that catalogue, but the widespread use of Red Hat in the US obviously adds to its appeal elsewhere, simply because of the tendency o

    • Part of the reason I think they are doing this is Fedora. RedHat may be providing in the future distro's for poeple to download still. Then again perhaps Fedora will flop. I simply don't know. It's too soon to make any determination whether this is a good move or not.

      Personally I am apprehensive and will be watching this very closely. I've used SUSE in the past and am looking at another linux distro for a backup (Debian). Just in case SUSE does dumb things :-)

  • It's about time! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    All I can say is: it's about time.

    I'm currently going through the pain of doing a Veritas
    install on RH Server, and let me tell you I have some
    *serious* reservations about this product. It is quite clear
    that the Veritas stuff is not designed well at all. As much as
    I'm a RH bigot, I'll drop them in a minute if this stuff runs
    well on SuSE.

    For example, in trying to bring up the Veritas stuff for what
    will be a NAS head, Veritas requires two primary
    partitions! Extended just won't work. Hello? This is an
    incredib

    • Most of what you mention are requirements on Sun equipment too. You install Solaris understanding you need to leave 2 partitions and a few megs free for Veritas to take over later. Since Linux isn't picky about using primaries, it doesn't really matter once you get used to the idea.

      As for NFS, I've had pretty good luck with it's performance if I give it extra network bandwidth, but yeah... it still needs work.

    • Re:It's about time! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Znork ( 31774 )
      Um, if you have discovered that Veritas is not very well designed why do you want it more integrated?

      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

  • Veritas is bad news! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Theovon ( 109752 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @09:17AM (#7318461)
    Where I work, we've had some rather unpleasant experiences with Veritas. I'm not the sysadmin, so I don't have all the details. In any event, we had a hardware failure, resulting in the need for a full restore from tape. Here are some of the problems we encountered with Veritas:

    - 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.

    • Re:Veritas is bad news! (Score:4, Informative)

      by larien ( 5608 ) * on Monday October 27, 2003 @09:36AM (#7318571) Homepage Journal
      I don't know about your other issues, but as far as I'm aware, Veritas uses USTAR format on tape; from http://www.data-storage.info/product.asp?pid=68 [data-storage.info]:
      Non-proprietary tape format provides the ability to create .tar compatible tapes

      • Re:Veritas is bad news! (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Tet ( 2721 ) *
        Veritas uses USTAR format on tape

        This is only true for trivial cases (single machine backup). In the real world, multiple machines back up to a central server concurrently. When that happens, Veritas uses it's own interleaved format on tape, which isn't readable with tar.

        • Ah, if you use multiplexing then yes; OTOH, you can have multiple tape drives and have Netbackup stream one client to each tape drive and that will also speed up restores (it will be able to stream from tape rather than stream/seek). This is true for all backup products, not just Veritas; if you interleave backups, you will degrade restore speed.

    • Re:Veritas is bad news! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Albanach ( 527650 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @09:47AM (#7318637) Homepage
      The documentation doesn't tell you this, but if you choose to have quick backups, then you get very slow restores.

      So they offered Quick Backups as an option rather than as default and you didn't think there must be some compromise? Don't you think that if quick backups were available without compromise, it would happen as standard?

      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.

      Given the number of enterprise organisations using Veritas, this sounds a lot like a problem with your setup. Have you spoken to their technical support team? Someone's probably had similar problems before. They can probably identify the problem and help you fix it.

      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.

      You bought proprietary software, and it uses a proporietary format. Are you surprised? Of course you could always download your enterprise class backup solution from freshmeat [freshmeat.net]. You buy enterprise software because of the support, so call up tech support, explain your problem. Ask them if they have a way of identifying what was backed up and what wasn't.

      Veritas support is prohibitively expensive.

      Yes, qualified technical experts tend to be. This is enterprise support, not a droid that can get by telling you to reinstall Win9x.

      We were down for a week because of this horrible software.

      No, you were down for a week because your SysAdmin clearly hadn't tested the company's disaster recovery plan before disaster finally hit. If you don't test your backup solution before you need it you can be 99% sure it'll fail when you do.

    • I am a sysadmin....

      - The documentation doesn't tell you this, but if you choose to have quick backups,then you get very slow restores.

      Um, I just flipped through the manual for about 15 seconds and found at least one example: "However, when you use multiplexing, expected reduced performance on restores...."

      - Our restore rate was about 1 megabyte per second.

      That sounds like a network or hardware or architecture bottleneck. Software has nothing to do with the tape speed writing to the disk you're re

    • I have experienced similar but I'd like to expand a little. Their favorite answer for ANY problem when dealing with the MS side is "Did you reboot the servers?". After that it gets worse. Having a support contract for a backup structure on paper is a great thing for a PHB but it has severe limits. 9 out of 10 times when we have an issue with backups, Veritas immediately jumps on the "its the other hardware" bandwagon. We end up going around and around with Compaq, Cisco, Veritas and MS over slow and no
    • Veritas uses some proprietary format on tape

      we are not using veritas at my place fo work, but i've heard the sales and tech guys give presentations on their product several times already. they told us they use a modified version of the GNU TAR, and the source should be included. like i said, we are not using netbackup at work, but if it is true what they told me, it should not be that proprietary at all.

  • As a real sysadmin (Score:5, Insightful)

    by nbvb ( 32836 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @09:19AM (#7318475) Journal
    As a real sysadmin (I don't play one on TV, I do the real thing), let me just say that this is most definitely a Good Thing (tm) for SuSE.

    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.

    The clustering product is also very, very robust. It's a simple, clean design, yet very powerful if you know how to take advantage of it. A welcome breath of fresh air after Sun Cluster 2.x and even 3.x (What dogs!)

    Does anyone else here know what Foundation Suite is? It provides a full volume management solution; no, this isn't so you can "mount your wind00z mp3z" or stuff like that. This is for real volume management, real disk replacement, real mirroring/striping/etc.

    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....

    Good for SuSE! About damned time Linux gained "real" volume management, filesystems & clustering.

    Real businesses trust their data to real companies. Veritas is one of 'em.

    • Re:As a real sysadmin (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Tet ( 2721 ) * <slashdot@nOsPam.astradyne.co.uk> on Monday October 27, 2003 @09:39AM (#7318583) Homepage Journal
      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.

      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:As a real sysadmin (Score:4, Interesting)

      by afabbro ( 33948 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @10:01AM (#7318706) Homepage
      Yeah, I'm a "real" sysadmin as well. However, I haven't drunk the Veritas kool-aid ;)

      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.

      • That is one thing I like about AIX and HP-UX - the LVM is integrated.

        HPUX LVM is a Veritas Product. Same with HPs onlineJFS.

        FS is just VxVM and VxFS bundled together.

        At a >30% discount.

        Veritas is a sick company.

        http://www.thestreet.com/_yahoo/tech/billsnyder / 10 121547.html

        Veritas grew through the economic downturn. Most of those issues are growing pains.

        Veritas is just a software company, not the messiah.

        Amen to that :)
      • I guess he was just a REAL sysadmin at a company with no REAL money. Veritas is a friggen hack for those who want SAN like features without paying the price.

        Obviously the poster to which you responded has never had any real issues with Veritas. When you do, they definitely aren't pretty. I've had FS contents disapear under veritas volumes only to be told after extensive troubleshooting that the cause is unknown. "Don't worry it is an aberrant behaviour, won't happen again." Then a couple months later when
    • VxFS and VxVM fast.... ? Did i miss something ? I use it with a LHN SAN and i cannot confirm the big speed gain. at least not with our W2KAS... Besides that, it is good to see that a Linux Distro like Suse is forming alliances with a Company like Veritas. It makes me more confident that they are there to stay... :)
    • "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."

      There are already several replacements for VxFS which, while useful, is not very unique. LVM also works as a replacement for VxVM, and there are other alternatives worked on. The alternatives to Veritas also have the huge advantage that they are free and integrated in Linux, which makes a huge difference in what level of PITA it becomes when dealing with it.

      I'll gladly pa
    • FreeVxFS [mail-archive.com]

      There's nothing magical about Veritas's implementation. Today we have FreeVxFS read-only support on Linux 2.4 and 2.6.

      QuickIO is a hack, leaving some ugly metadata symlinks around on the filesystem.

      -molo

  • Go SuSe!! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by dr.Flake ( 601029 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @09:19AM (#7318476)


    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.
  • Veritas can't even keep up the arrangements it already has. Where's the Netbackup client for Red Hat Linux 9? What's that? Out this summer sometime, huh? Okay.
  • Cool. Maybe they can use Georgy Russell [georgyforgov.com] as their new spokesperson. I understand she works for Veritas (according to the page).

  • Now to see... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Doomrat ( 615771 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @09:30AM (#7318543) Homepage

    now to see how it all pans out.

    Excrutiatingly boringly.

  • Do Suse and Redhat really need to compete with each other? Fighting Microsoft is bad enough, do they need to fight each other too? I think a better business strategy would be to work together and increase their power.
    • You mean like, form a cartel, the bastard cousin of a monopoly.

      Or do you mean a strategic alliance ? I'm sure Suse is hot for one of those, after their experience with United Linux together with ...er... SCO

    • Actually, yes they do. A monoculture in Linux is still a monoculture.
      Any monoculture leads to stagnation and inherant weaknesses evolving. Competition is what ignites the evolution towards stronger performance and efficiency.
      Good ideas from Suse that create a standard will most likely hit a note with the Linux distros as a whole, and be incorporated across the board in short time.
      Any silly ideas just won't make the grade, and will be supplanted by real stuff for real people in short order.
      Distros on the w
    • and SuSE isn't.

      C'mon, charging Itanic prices for Red Hat Enterprise for x86-64 and having NO x86-64 support in Fedora Core? What is Red Hat thinking?

      SuSE, OTOH, supports the x86-64 chips (AMD Opteron, Athlon 64) much more broadly. As does Mandrake.

      Maybe when Red Hat sees users jumping ship to other Linux distros they'll get in gear.
  • As a former employee of SuSE I'm actually delighted to hear that SuSE has managed to partner with one of the upper league software companies besides Oracle and SAP. This is good for both SuSE and Linux in general, at least here in europe.

  • Veritas Marketing Ideas (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Joe U ( 443617 ) *
    I'm looking forward to SuSE using some of Veritas' brilliant marketing.

    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

  • 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 o

  • Distro-specific (Score:3, Interesting)

    by phorm ( 591458 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @10:38AM (#7319004) Journal
    I think that there's a danger in any particular distribution of linux gaining too much market, particularly the more commercial ones. Commercial-driver-development has been quite telling in the area of distro-preference, with RedHat (and actually, quite often SuSe already) being the common distros supported by hardware vendors?

    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.

  • Not interested (Score:3, Interesting)

    by harlows_monkeys ( 106428 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @11:32AM (#7319489) Homepage
    Until they make YaST GPL, I'm not interested. The YaST license does not meet the FSF defition of "free", nor does it meet the Open Source Initiative's defintion of an open source license.

    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.

    • I'm glad I'm not the only one
      I find it humorous a distro with tons of propriatary software and a fraction of upstream controbutions is suppose to be our protection from this evil (Redhat) monoply.

    • and now with fedora, you won't have to worry as much about the name, since that is hald the point of the project.

  • Mandrake (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by randomErr ( 172078 )
    In mother Russia we only use Mandrake.

    Not only is good fruit, is great distro!

    Couldn't resist ;)
  • So far, SuSE Enterprise 8.0 is the only Linux version, and actually the only open source product, to have ever undergo Common Criteria evaluation. Currently SuSE holds and EAL 2+, and SuSE and IBM are planning on getting that level up to 3 or 4 (can't remember exactly).
    Common Criteria evaluation may seem useless to a lot of people here, and those people have a point, up to a certain extent, but a lot of decision makers want to see a certain EAL, and in some organisations, a certain EAL is mandatory.
    So SuSE
  • I don't understand all these diferent Linux distributions. If we want to stand up to Microsoft Linux developers must unite not compete! I don't see any reason why the most important features of every distro can be implemented into one ultimate OS of the Universe which can rule the world. Look... honestly, the only reason I see that people use other distros is for the petty differences. All WIndows users have to put up with it's crap. I think we should be forced to tolerate a unified Linux distro. It's hardl
  • I've just recently started looking into LVM and I'm curious as to what it's lacking, if anything, compared to similar solutions by from Vertias. Can someone with experience with both products please be kind enough to throw up a couple points detailing when you should use LVM and when you shouldn't?

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