Red Hat Not Seeing Microsoft, Ubuntu as Threats 241
Ian Price writes "Red Hat is shrugging off Microsoft's entry into the cluster computing space after Microsoft announced that it has completed the code for its Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 targeting high-performance computing. From the article: 'Scott Crenshaw, general manager of enterprise Linux platform at Red Hat, dismissed Microsoft's entry into cluster computing. "They're playing catch-up," he said. "Linux is often associated with high-performance computing, but Windows has never achieved that on a large scale."' Crenshaw also commented with respect to Ubuntu: 'Their user base is still small, so we're not seeing the impact of it [Ubuntu] so far.'"
Microsoft has been into clustering for years. (Score:5, Interesting)
They've had several clusters into the Top500 several times.
A couple examples are a NSCA self-made cluster of NT machines that reached rank 207 in June 2000 top500 list. It consisted of 256-processor production supercluster, which consists of 128 Hewlett-Packard machines with dual 550-MHz Intel Pentium III Xeon processors.
These early efforts were typified by statements like:
"Couldn't barely get the benchmark done before the entire cluster would go done"
"If one node failed the entire cluster would go down"
And stuff like that.
That's the first time NT posted a top500 standing. They had earlier efforts going back several years.
About every single top500 list since then had a Microsoft-based cluster somewere.. Until recently.
Now Linux, which started gaining ground about the same time that Microsoft started with clustering research, now dominates the top500 list.
Good luck on that one, MS. I also like how their P.R. stuff always makes it sound like Microsoft just started getting into clustering.
Re:Famous last words (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Red Hat doesn't need to do much. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Red Hat doesn't need to do much. (Score:2, Interesting)
The nice things about portage are (1) it works (FC4 users on AMD64 machines attempting to use RPM aren't able to claim this, doubly so if they attempt to use RPM to install MySQL on their Fedora boxes... trust me), (2) it uses metadata effectively (unlike RPM), (3) portage makes sure packages will be custom made for your machine.
The package management for Ubuntu is nice, and I think of it to be superior to RPM and the other update packages used on Fedora. However it does have a few flaws.
BTW, Yum was 'borrowed' From Yellow Dog Linux, a Red Hat offshoot for PPC.
Re:Microsoft's buisness plan (Score:2, Interesting)
"It is a race between PROGRAMMERS, to create idiotproof programs, and GOD, to create better idiots. So far God is winning".
If you leave the jokes apart, God is helping Microsoft to get away with it, by creating better idiots;)
Why Linux is Da Bomb! (Score:4, Interesting)
Given that I'm not Microsoft, or Red Hat, I'd rather be a Red Hat stockholder than a Microsoft stockholder.
Also, I'd rather be monetizing services for rapidly spreading open-source software, than trying to get developing nations to pay for my proprietary software.
I urge you to focus on the direction and rate of the change, rather than the magnitude of the status quo.
There are too many people in the world not using computers yet. Eventually, most will. But if everyone paid Windows licensing fees, many developing nations would have to hand over most of their GNP to Microsoft. That's absurd!
In my humble opinion, it makes sense for India, China and several other developing countries to throw their collective might behind internationalized open-source software running on commodity hardware. When there are literally a million eyeballs scouring OSS for bugs, we'll see phenomenal changes in this playing field!
If intellectual property were enriched Uranium, intellectual property law would be the mechanism in an atomic bomb that prevents critical mass, and an economic boom.
Re:Red Hat doesn't need to do much. (Score:3, Interesting)
Assuming you mean rpm vs dpkg, this is irrelevant. rpm has very few problems to fix.
I am sick of downloading packages from weird websites
If you're running RedHat, you shouldn't really be doing this anyway, you should be using up2date.
If you need packages not supplied by RedHat, there are repos for RedHat.
But, this has nothing to do with "fixing the package manager", it is more about the available packages on RedHat. However, a lot of the packages *I* need that are missing on RedHat (we have approx 150 source packages in our internal repo which we build for RHEL2, 3 and 4) aren't packaged in Ubuntu. And, some of the ones I need which *are* available on RedHat, aren't available on Ubuntu either.
YUM seems tacked on, and I've never gotten it to work properly.
While yum isn't IMHO the best rpm tool equivalent of apt, I've never seen it not work.
Now, you've been comparing apt to rpm, but there are many other aspects to package management that RedHat does get right, for example the features of up2date/RHN:
-grouping of servers and scheduling of updates (that you can show your CTO, not some script)
-profiles in RHN for kickstarting servers
-config file channels (something like cfengine, but built into RHN)
-ability to kickstart servers from the RHN interface
With an RHN satellite server, you can have custom channels, which you can then use for both of the above, but doing all package management from the satellite server.
So, don't compare rpm to apt (which is a mistake in itself) because RedHat ships/supports fewer packages, and then leave out all the features RedHat *does* have regarding package management.
Also, last I checked Ubuntu's kickstart was still missing lots of features I actually use (even though we don't use Satellite, we use kickstart and our own repos, which we use to install packages during the %post section of kickstart using smart [smartpm.org].
So, I can see why RH isn't worried about Ubuntu.
Re:Microsoft and Ubuntu not a threat (Score:4, Interesting)
Close, but not quite. Ubuntu is a classic dotcom strategy by one of the winners in the dotcom game - and it's a safe bet that Shuttleworth is out to do it again. How did he win the first time? By building a highly visible company and then selling it, to great personal advantage. A lot of what Canonical is doing makes a lot more sense when you keep that in mind. They don't need to figure out how to build revenue, they just need to get eyeballs and market share, so that the company has considerable sale value.
As for Redhat, they probably don't consider Ubuntu to be a threat because they realise this. Redhat's market is, as has been noted, high-end enterprise users. That means that both Redhat and their users must be run by people with a deep understanding of the business world. Anybody with considerable business experience can see what Canonical are doing - it's not like they're trying to hide it, even if they don't go out and announce these things. The important thing is that enterprise users don't want to buy from a company who might not still be there in five years time. Redhat have 'staying power' - they've been through a lot and they're still playing at the top levels of the market, so they feel good to enterprise users. Canonical just doesn't smell like that. It smells like a rich kid's toy, and when he gets tired of playing he'll cash in and make a stupidly huge amount of money, and then the company could become anything. It's just not a safe bet that Canonical will still be there and doing the same things in five years. So enterprise customers are going to feel uneasy about Ubuntu, and go with the safer Redhat instead. Anything they want will just be duplicated by the Redhat engineers anyway.
Redhat are playing in the 'big business' game now. That means they have slightly perverse priorities, but they aren't stupid and neither are their customers. A lot of things change when your customers aren't stupid.
Re:Red Hat doesn't need to do much. (Score:3, Interesting)
Gee, I think all of these things can be done fairly easily using dpkg. [Dunno how difficult they are to do using rpm, or why you had a hard time figuring them out... they're all covered in the introductory reference manuals on Debian.] The only claim that is even marginally defensible is that package building is superior, but that's because dpkg itself has nothing to do with building deb packages. That's done using dpkg-deb (and more typically the sane frontends to it). Now, if I wanted to be truly evil, I'd just point at this rpm bug [redhat.com]...
Re:Microsoft's buisness plan (Score:4, Interesting)
I just don't have to reboot anymore.
It's worth the driver hell that one often has to go through on a new system. Systems shipped with Linux? Probably a great idea.