[olug] support costs. for Linux

[Nick Walter]

As for distribution choice, I won't go into that to avoid any distribution
holy wars ;-)

As for support costs, my company purchases support directly from red-hat for
critical systems.  We use red-hat linux for computer telephony platforms and
database servers.  The support runs us roughly $6k for 1 year of 24/7
call-anytime support on 5 servers.  Since we use Oracle databases and red
hat will provide limited Oracle troubleshooting help, that sounds like a
real good deal.  Mind you, I've never actually needed to call them, but it's
nice to know the support is there if something goes really wrong and I can't
figure out.

Honestly, a well setup linux server of any stable distrubtion running a
mature stable application should be solid as a rock.  My company has a mixed
environment of (older) WinNT and linux servers for me to feed and care for,
and the NT servers are the ones that need all the babysitting.

Nick Walter
Interact Incorporated

The above message is a personal opinion of Nick Walter and does not
necessary reflect the policies, opinions, or prejudices of his employer.  No
animals were harmed in the making of this message.

-----Original Message-----
From: Schmeits, Roger [mailto:schmeits at clarksoncollege.edu]
Sent: Thursday, October 04, 2001 3:40 PM
To: 'olug at bstc.net'
Subject: [olug] support costs. for Linux



What are typical support costs for Linux servers???  I have a quote from
Caldera for a 5 pack at $1650 or per server is $3130 per year.  SUSE is $400
per incident.  This will be for Apache, Squid, content filtering at the
packet level, MRTG packages running on Redhat, SUSE or Solaris.  We run all
Compaq machines and I am limited to these three operating systems.

Would anyone like to expand on/share your experiences?  I have strong
windows background and have been playing with Linux for about one year.  I
have installed most Linux distros in one degree or another.  Caldera seems
to work as well as anything for us here.  I don't not feel comfortable just
throwing a machine without a high degree of success.  I am not the brightest
bulb in the room but I will not kill my career without some type of support
system underneath me.  Hopefully within the next two years I can wean myself
of any support contact but initially it is a necessity.  I already threw the
idea at my boss and he seemed to be ok with my idea.

Currently we have a T1 that is pretty well soaked during the day and am
looking a SQUID to allieviate the problem.  Or at least knock the top 20% of
the traffic through our ISP.  I have one Compq ML370 1G CPU with 500M ram.
Plenty of disk space to boot.

Any comments?

Roger



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