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December 19, 2008

Late yesterday afternoon, Red Hat launched a new maintenance service aimed at making it more cost-effective for its customers to run and maintain one single version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux for a longer period of time.

The new program is designed to help cut management and administration costs, Red Hat said, while at the same time help streamline operations.

Gerry Riveros, Red Hat's product marketing manager says that EUS (Extended Update Support) is a new maintenance option that allows Red Hat users to standardize their IT environments on a version of RHEL for one-year-and-a-half instead of the usual six months, the current time frame for Red Hat's maintenance contract.

Through EUS, the Linux company will support whatever standard version of RHEL a customer is on with bug fixes and security updates for 18 months, which means customers won't have to recertify or update all of their applications and hardware for a new version of RHEL until that period is over, Riveros said.

This recertification process costs money and takes up IT resources, so EUS provides an option that is more cost-effective for Red Hat customers than updating every six months, which is what customers usually have to do on the current maintenance contract, Riveros said.

Overall, Linux users don't like to update their operating systems too frequently, he said, because they are afraid that changes they make could cause performance problems in their overall IT system.

"There are some Linux customers who would like to be able to run RHEL as long as possible without re-evaluation," Riveros added, however.

With the global meltdown in full swing since early October, companies also are looking to seriously reduce costs from their IT budgets, and being able to maintain RHEL for a longer period of time will help them achieve that.

Stephen O'Grady, an analyst at Redmonk agreed that "for customers with large, highly specific and standardized Linux deployments, change is bad, even with the quality of advice that Red Hat and other Linux vendors provide."

By slowing that rate of change, the user is able to reduce overall platform risk.

EUS costs the same as Red Hat's current maintenance service, which varies depending on how many computers or workstations a customer has. For up to 100 machines, maintenance starts at $60,000 a year; for up to 500 machines, it starts at $80,000 a year, Riveros said.

Red Hat will continue to offer its current maintenance plan, which provides operating system updates and bug fixes every six months, he added.

Source: Red Hat.

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