On Fri, 2007-08-10 at 15:33 -0700, Alexei_Roudnev wrote:
> Sysadmins are not dumb - seen all this, they select RHEL4 or UL4 - these 2
> systems are well compatible with all Oracle versions (I can even run
> Oracle8i on RHEL4, with some hacks) and are rock-solid.

Your right, sysadmins are not dumb, unfortunately, software companies
are dumb. They seem to be pushing shorter and shorter product
lifecycles and have forgone "stable" products for simply "current"
products. Last time I looked Novell's official lifecycle for SLES9 was
five years. Oracle's support for their database products is not much
better, although at least you can pay extra.

Now, 5 years may sound like a long time, but the problem is that modern
software products are complex and generally full of bugs when they are
released. It usually takes 1-2 years before a product truly becomes
stable. Many companies won't even look at a product until the 1st or
2nd service release, which is usually between 1-2 years after a product
release. Then it usually takes another few months before it's approved
for deployment and another year to be deployed within the company. That
means that a product doesn't see major market penetration until 2-3
years into it's lifecycle. If the product only has a 5 year lifecycle
that means only 2-3 years of truly usable time in most companies.
That's far too short for critical software like databases and OS's.

My guess is that this is what lead to RHEL4 being certified while SLES9
is not. Redhat has a 7 year lifecycle on it's products, but Novell only
officially guarantees 5 years (as far as I know anyway). That means
that SLES9 is scheduled to be desupported on August 2009 only two years
from now, and it already feels abandoned.

RHEL4 on the other hand, will be supported until Feb 2012, nearly 4 1/2
years from now, even though it's initial release only trailed the SLES9
release by 6 months. Those two years might not seem like much, but they
are huge for most companies and have a huge TCO impact. It was one of
the major reasons that we switched from SUSE to Redhat several years
ago.

Later,
Tom


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