[Beowulf] Redmond is at it, again

[Roger L. Smith]

On Tue, 25 May 2004, Jeffrey B. Layton wrote:

> For some people, me being one of them, this is a HUGE threat. Let me
> explain.
>
> Redhat, Suse, etc. have gone to a per-CPU price for license
> and support driving up the costs of installing the OS on a cluster.
> In fact, the last quote I got for a 72 node cluster averaged about
> $400 a node!

Amen!

I recently talked to RedHat about purchasing RHEL for my systems.  Based
on my needs for two large clusters and a smattering of desktops, they were
asking nearly $10,000 PER YEAR for it, and that was educational pricing!

Our university has a major licensing agreement with Novell, and it looks
like SLES will be available to me through that agreement in a few months.

But when we started trying to decide how up upgrade our RedHat 7.3
installations, we were stymied.  We couldn't justify the costs of the
commercial distros, I need something a little more stable than Fedora, and
I'm just a bit uneasy about converting these large production clusters to
any of the other distros.

Part of this reluctance is because I'm sure if I have problems with my
commercial compilers or other commercial software that I run, they're not
going to want to give me support if I'm running some distro that they've
never heard of.

I'm willing to spend a little money to get the software, but not the rates
that they're demanding.



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| Roger L. Smith                        Phone: 662-325-3625               |
| Sr. Systems Administrator             FAX:   662-325-7692               |
| roger at ERC.MsState.Edu                 http://WWW.ERC.MsState.Edu/~roger |
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