Red Hat: Stick with Windows at home

[Sunner]

I was about to mention IBM as well, their Global Services, along with their support is definately top notch, but for a price.
Sun is also very good, again, for a price, at least they were back when I actually used their support, I don't know if that's changed since, with their poor results lately and all.

Does anyone know if IBM offers complete solutions based on Linux by the way?
Say you wanted a big DB2 box running SuSE enterprise or something, could one merely call IBM and have them to everything from shipping the box to helping with the DB2 setup, as well as supporting the whole thing, right from hardware to SuSE and DB2?

Sounds like something they could sell to me

 

[Smilin]

Yes, they'll offer a complete solution. They might do suse, but I know they do Redhat.

btw. I've worked for IBM global before and I pity any company that uses them. Their sales guys use a "You're too dumb to do all this complicated stuff, let us handle it for you" approach and it works like a charm. They then hand off the work to subcontractors and provide pretty poor support.

HP isn't too bad. Of course when it gets tough they go to the back office and quietly call MS.

 

[sciencewhiz]

I've never used Microsoft's or Redhat's support, but I can relay a story about Microsoft's

My old boss found a bug in Word for DOS about 10 years ago. He spent some time making sure it was reproducible, and then reported it. Microsoft thanked him for the bug report, then he didn't hear anything about it. 6 months later, he got a Microsoft mug, and the next version of word, with a letter thanking him for reporting the bug, and telling him that it was now fixed.

About two years ago, he found a bug in a windows API call. He spent some time making sure it was reproducible, and then reported it. Microsoft thanked him for the bug report, then he didn't hear anything about it, ever.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: Sunner
I was about to mention IBM as well, their Global Services, along with their support is definately top notch, but for a price.
Sun is also very good, again, for a price, at least they were back when I actually used their support, I don't know if that's changed since, with their poor results lately and all.

Does anyone know if IBM offers complete solutions based on Linux by the way?
Say you wanted a big DB2 box running SuSE enterprise or something, could one merely call IBM and have them to everything from shipping the box to helping with the DB2 setup, as well as supporting the whole thing, right from hardware to SuSE and DB2?

Sounds like something they could sell to me

The "NEATEST" thing that IBM does IMO is the partition. IBM developed the VM stuff and are masters of it. In their mainframes and high-end computers hey have things called partitions. Each partition is a slice of CPU time, I/O resources, ram and any other resources. You can rent the "slice" of it and they will install a linux server on it.

This is for mostly web services, but you need more power, you give a phone call and they give it to you. For a $ of course. You can scedual more partitions to be added to your server as you progress, plus you can do like people do for bandwith and get peak usage rates on partition rates and do stuff like scedual more cpu time for high-usage parts of the day and so on. Anything you want.

They also sell servers running linux.

You see they like linux now alot. Before they had 4 seperate OSes for different machine classes. Mainframe, Unix server, workstation, whatever. OS/390, AIX and a couple other ones.

Using Linux they can replace ANY of them (well mainframes are very weird, unlike PCs or Servers so it's a bit complicated, relatively weak for cpu power, but I/O KINGS so they run Linux in the VM partitions stuff.) On several occasions they have been know to recommend Linux OVER the AIX unix OS for customers, even old IBM standards. So from the smallest workstation, up to the supercomputers they design, you can get Linux on it from IBM. Usually Redhat, sometimes Suse.

The new thing is blade servers. You get a box you put on a rack. Instead of the stack 1ui rack you get 25 or so hot swapable dual cpu PC boards. They use commodity hardware in most cases. Sun, IBM, and a whole host of companies from mom and pop basements type stuff up to the big boys are designing and building this stuff.

One interesting extreme is the "Green Destiny" system made up of a bunch of low-power (cpu and electricity) Transmeta Crusoe processors on pretty much laptop hardware. Each cpu uses 6 watts of power at full blast. This thing could literally fit AND actually run in your closet and it's all on just one rack. It has 240 cpu's....

 

[Sunner]

The little experience I've had with IBM's service guys has been great.
Of course, I've only had to deal with the techies, not the salespeople

And I doubt they could sell us a whole lot of stuff we don't need, heck we don't even buy the stuff we need.

Was just curious anyways, Im surprised our DB guys haven't checked this with IBM.

 

[drag]

I remember a story that my dad told me about IBM and a company he worked for.

The company just bought a new mainframe and were worried about the reliability of such a complicated machine.

You know the solution IBM sales people and the owners came up with?

Buy a second mainframe and stick it in a warehouse, "Just in case"

 

[Goosemaster]

Windows, Linux?


In the end it is just a medium for information access.

Linux is catching on, besides becasue of the cost, because it is a community project that everyone feels good using. Linux is the definition of "group effort" and the corressponding results.


Of course it is not ready for the desktop. MS and APple have had more than a decade of development time SPECIFFICALLY aimed at the desktop.

Linux on the other hand has spent that time as the child of mainframe grandfathers seeing renewed applicability in UNIX.

In the end, n one should give a rats ass what the fsck you use, except that you are prospering. Windows, is the most used desktop OS in the world. THat's why I learned it. Simply because it was hter to learn. Linux is becoming popular. I learned what I know of it and continue to learn more everyday about it. It is now my main OS. Why, because it exists and I want to learn it.

Linux is not ready for the desktop because it's roots do not lie in a self-contained box. It's roots lie in terminal-mainframe configurations that ushered in the age of multi0user computing. To criticize it's failures on the desktop is just plain ignorant unless you are responding to someone who believes it is ready.

It is a server os. It CAN become a nice DESKTOP OS, but not yet.


It is a bitch to learn. Then again, look at who/what its targeted at.

Men of math.

 

[drag]

men of math

?


whew, at least not men of spelling, I am damn lucky in that respect.

 

[Goosemaster]

Originally posted by: drag

men of math

?


whew, at least not men of spelling, I am damn lucky in that respect.

 

[Jeff7181]

I think they should keep a workstation version around... if nothing more than to sell to the businesses that are using Linux servers for the employees to use on their computers. I bet productivity would increase if they didn't spend time fooling around in Windows... give them something unfamiliar and watch them work cause they don't know how to do anything else.

 

[Nothinman]

They have an Enterprise Workstation line.

 

[Ferocious]

He probably got his hands on a copy of Longhorn.

 

[Nothinman]

He probably got his hands on a copy of Longhorn.

If that were the case I'm sure he wouldn't be telling everyone to use Windows at home until they got a lot more memory, one of the Longhorn shots I saw showed WinFS using over 100M memory by itself.