Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

August 15, 2008

Recently, Red Hat said that it is extending the first phase of its product lifecycle support for Enterprise Linux, when the most technical support resources are made available, from three years to four.

This simply means that new hardware coming out at any time during the first four years of an Enterprise Linux lifecycle will be supported.

Previously, that "full support" phase only lasted for three years.

In the sixth and seventh years, or what Red Hat now calls Production 3 instead of "maintenance" support, only urgent, security-related or mission critical bug fixes will be added to Enterprise Linux.

For example, security-related issues and bug fixes are carried out most extensively in the first phase or Production 1 support. In the second phase, or what Rad Hat calls the Production 2 period -- the fifth year of support -- only the high priority or urgent bug fixes will be applied.

The new phases apply to the current 5.2 release of Enterprise Linux and to all future releases, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux development team said in a blog Wednesday.

Needed security patches, on the other hand, will be applied at any time during the supported 7-year product lifecycle, Red Hat said.

Red Hat's development team explained it in this sentence: "we're doing this because we have noticed that Linux vendors are confusing customers by using the same service-level names to mean totally different things. Enterprise customers are being misled by 'our (the other Linux vendors) Full Support is cheaper than their Full Support' messages, even though the actual features -- which are not mentioned -- differ widely." (!) (...)

Sidenote: Oracle isn't named here but it has previously announced that it is redistributing Red Hat Enterprise Linux under its own brand and said that it will charge less than Red Hat for technical support.

It will be interesting to see in the next couple of months how other Linux vendors view this and the steps they will take (or fail to take) in trying to emulate Red Hat (or not).

More and more today, businesses of all sizes and organizations in various industries are starting to increasingly rely on qualified Linux support representatives to make sure their systems and Linux applications are working as they were intended.

Source: Red Hat.

Add to del.icio.us     Digg this

ADVERTISERS:
Linux News Today.org is read by over 450,000 people involved in the field of Linux application development, professional Web hosting services, Linux security, Linux Web development, etc. Inquire about our reasonable advertising rates on our news website. One of our advertising representatives will be in touch with you. Simply email us to learn about our ad rates and how we can help drive relevant traffic to your website. Advertising space is limited.