Linux sucks?

[James Mckenzie]

Ok folks, as a support engineer I have to point this out:

Support Contract:  A contract for support that is entered into by a support company (in this case mostly RedHat) and you the customer.

SLA:  Service Level Agreement:  This is an addendum to the above mentioned support contract that sets time limits on when a certain event (like a total production server failure) will be responded to and corrected.  This is sort of like the DELL Latitude 48 hour repair or replace "GOLD" level contract.  This may require more monies to implement (and usually does.)  Failure by the support company to comply with the SLAs in the support contract may require paybacks to the supported company.

Just thought I would like to clarify this.  What RH supplies to an individual customer is a SLA backed support contract of a certain level.  This definately changes when you are talking about support to a server farm supporting a world wide company and that company pays more for support.

James McKenzie


-----Original Message-----
From: Gerald Thompson <geraldlt at gmail.com>
Sent: Feb 14, 2005 12:32 AM
To: For users of Fedora Core releases <fedora-list at redhat.com>
Subject: Re: Linux sucks?

Kunal Shah wrote:

>Major problem using Linux as server is the Support. As such we don't
>have proper support for Linux operating system. I understand that we do
>have lot of users and mailing list and people involved with Linux
>community are kind enough to share experience and solutions however,
>what about SLA ( Service Level Agreement)? .
>
>Although I know Linux is much more stable them windows, I cannot
>convince my upper management to use it because of only one question. If
>anything goes wrong in production, what is our SLA to resolve the issue
>and get it back on board.
>  
>
!ummm, you do know that Red Hat Enterprise and Suse Enterprise are under 
!SLA.  That is the whole point, when you do RHE or SE you pay for an SLA 
!contract not the software.  They are not charging you for the software 
!they are charging you for the SLA agreement for one year.  You can also 
!get multi-year SLA's too.

What you get is a Service Support Contract with a certain SLA. You can change the SLAs in the contract, but you will pay more.  And Service Support Contracts are availabe for mulli-year intervals with varying SLAs and to cover more than one release of a given software package.  Support contracts vary between software/hardware manfacturers/producers.  You might get a better 'deal' by shopping around and looking for 'best of breed' hardware/software.

-- 
James McKenzie
(Yes I work with hardware/software on a daily basis, Linux is hobby for me, that's why I use Fedora.)


James McKenzie
A Proud User of Linux!