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Red Hat Not Seeing Microsoft, Ubuntu as Threats 241

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the keeping-a-stiff-upper-lip dept.
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.'"
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Red Hat Not Seeing Microsoft, Ubuntu as Threats More

Red Hat Not Seeing Microsoft, Ubuntu as Threats

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  • Famous last words (Score:5, Insightful)

    by HeavensBlade23 ( 946140 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2006 @01:36AM (#15530095)
    I think Netscape was quoted as saying something similar shortly before Internet Explorer utterly destroyed their marketshare. If nothing else, don't underestimate Microsoft's ability to leverage their monopoly into new markets.

    • Re:Famous last words (Score:2, Interesting)

      by DJ_Perl ( 648258 )
      Consider this metric! [yahoo.com]

      • Re:Famous last words (Score:4, Informative)

        by saden1 ( 581102 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2006 @02:51AM (#15530305)
        When was the last time Redhad had revenue of 1 billion let alone in profit? The key statistics you should be looking at is not historical stock price, which is highly inflated by the gamblers in wall street, but their war chests. Microsoft had 34 billion of pure profit on 42 billion in revenue last year while Redhat had on 230 million in profit on 278 million in revenue. Both really good margins but I'd rather be MS than Redhat.

        • Why Linux is Da Bomb! (Score:4, Interesting)

          by DJ_Perl ( 648258 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2006 @04:28AM (#15530565) Homepage
          I agree with most of your comment. Here's where I take a different view --
          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.
          • Microsoft has over $30 billion in the bank. Red Hat does not. The entire world could switch to Linux and not pay Red Hat a dime....because Linux is free. There's no way any sane non-political person would want to be a RH shareholder over a Microsoft shareholder.
          • Sure, Red Hat may have good room for growth. But that's not a good argument. If Microsoft were to completely stop growing their market today, they'd still have 50 times more market than Red Hat will probably ever have.
      • Consider this metric!

        Lies [yahoo.com], damn [yahoo.com] lies [yahoo.com], statistics! [yahoo.com]

    • Re:Famous last words (Score:5, Insightful)

      by strider44 ( 650833 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2006 @02:21AM (#15530226)
      I'm not sure how they're going to leverage their monopoly for cluster computing... It's not as if they'll be giving it away with Windows Vista... More likely the purchasing officers with major enterprise vendors of cluster computing will get many free lunches in the next few months, and perhaps a free car or two.
      • In theory, it would be easier to port a Windows app to a Windows cluster. I don't see this catching on with scientific researchers at all, but in the financial world, they're just not as concerned about up-front costs if it fits their current computer system and works as a drop-in solution. A bank running Windows desktops and Windows servers could easily fall for it... I mean, go for it.
        • I wonder if it's even a revenue strategy for Microsoft, or just a competitive thing to be in every market their competitors are, forcing them to spread out their more limited marketing resources.
          • It's going to be a revenue strategy. Lots of MS's corporate customers really want the ability to run clustered versions of the back-end apps, so much so that when MS pushed out a half-assed version of their cluster stuff a few years ago, a fair number of their customers jumped on it and started using it to make their data centers more efficient while asking for more. As I understand it, this caught MS somewhat on the hop; they did not expect that sort of takeup at all. But given that lots of larger customer
      • And "preferred partner" discounts for their desktop software licenses, and the vendors of hardware will be pushed to pay for MS licenses for their cluster systems or lose their discounts for desktops. Microsoft has been caught at that illegal monopolistic behavior, and barely gotten their wrist slapped. It's unfortunately no longer a surprise no interesting, it's just standard criminal behavior for them.

        More interesting is whether Vista will be capable of cluster computing: AS the legacies of DOS have falle

        • Re:Famous last words (Score:3, Insightful)

          by drsmithy ( 35869 )
          More interesting is whether Vista will be capable of cluster computing: AS the legacies of DOS have fallen out of Microsoft support, and its core more moved towards the NT built by David Cutler with his stolen work from DEC's VMS, it's actually become more of a seriously powerful OS and could conceivably be up to the task.

          How do you steal something you invented ?

      • I'm not sure how they're going to leverage their monopoly for cluster computing...

        At "casual" end of the market, a Windows version of XGrid - there's a hell of a lot of mostly-idle Windows machines out there.

    • Copy, Create, Conquer.

      They absolutely done it more than once. Im suprised how microsoft keeps getting away with it.
      • Somebody told me definition of programming..

        "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;)

    • ...is the fact that Red Hat had been quoting Ghandi with the "First they ignore you..." stuff in some of their flash ad campaigns. Talk about practice what you preach. Seems like RedHat is turning into a big group of hypocrites. *hugs apt-get/debian*

    • Except that (Score:5, Insightful)

      by DrYak ( 748999 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2006 @07:54AM (#15531108) Homepage
      This time RedHat != Linux.

      If RH starts loosing market share, it'll more likely be to other Linux distributor or other opensource os, like suse,ubuntu,debian,openbsd,etc.
      It's not the whole Linux community of developppers ingoring they adversaries, it's only *a* specific solution vendor.
      You can kill distribution, but it's much harder to kill Linux as a whole.

      Netscape Navigator almost disappeared back then, because it depended on a sinle company and that company failed to notice the threat and lost market shares. ...

      That and I'm sure Microsoft will manage to build something that sucks in terms of scaliability, reliability and above all : possibility of customisation and reasonnable per-CPU license price.
      Some labs build huge clusters, this new Windows flavor must cost less than the "Windows Beginners Edition [a.k.a. 3rd world edition]" (*) and provide impeccable service, otherwise it can't compete with opensource softwares.

      Plus, unlike in the browser case, Microsoft can't try to leverage its desktop OS monopoly : you can bundle a browser on a widely deployed OS, but you can't "bundle a cluster" inside the OS - that sentence doesn't make sense.
      Clusters are mostly custom build to specific needs, by people who have enough technical knowledge to assemble whatever they need. Windows Cluster-flavor must attract them by its qualities, not because laziness drives them to choose whatever option came with the box...

      (*): ...hum... wonder if this windows flavor could be subverted as an even cheaper Windows to be installed on desktops. (I don't mind missing all "wonderful" features available in other flavors like the ActiveX-bugged IE or the DRM-laden Media Player. Just want a kernel that is compatible with games. I'll fix the gaps with OSS and stick to linux for the rest)

      • Re:Except that (Score:3, Insightful)

        by dwandy ( 907337 )

        Some labs build huge clusters, this new Windows flavor must cost less than the "Windows Beginners Edition [a.k.a. 3rd world edition]" (*) and provide impeccable service, otherwise it can't compete with opensource softwares.

        You're working under the false assumption that price is the sole/major factor when organisations choose products and services.
        If that were the case, Windows would have been wiped out by Linux 5yrs ago. Not only has it failed to wipe out Windows, we're still having the "is it ready for t

    • Re:Famous last words (Score:3, Insightful)

      by hey! ( 33014 )
      In fact, that's the most historically successful Microsoft business strategy.

      You'd think one of the things about having a company is that you'd be able to take the talents of all the people in it and create an organization that could both innovate technologically, and bring those technologies to market competitively. But over the years I've come to doubt this. It's rare to have a company that does both; perhaps Google.

      Microsoft has consistently waited to for other companies to prove that a technology is f
    • Exactly. Nobody should ever look at Microsoft was a non-competitor. I'm sure the anti-spyware guys thought the same thing. Then MS made their own (bought out someone elses) anti-spyware package. Same goes for everything else. MS had no mapping software, then google started doing all this cool mapping software, and microsoft said "Me Too", and within a couple months, has something on par with what google was offering. Microsoft will always be a competitor, especially when there's lots of money at stake.
    • "I think Netscape was quoted as saying something similar shortly before Internet Explorer utterly destroyed their marketshare."

      Interesting choice of analogy.

      Obviously there is one significant factor which makes it a poor choice, that is the monopoly Microsoft has on the desktop and their ability to preload their competing product, Internet Explorer, on every PC that ships with Windows in their monopoly controlled desktop market.

      And also note how significant work went into developing IE until Netscape was pu

  • Just like MS (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Umbral Blot ( 737704 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2006 @01:39AM (#15530108) Homepage
    'Their user base is still small, so we're not seeing the impact of it [Ubuntu] so far.'

    I am sure Microsoft said the same thing about Red Hat. Pride goes before a fall Red Hat.

    • Re:Just like MS (Score:5, Insightful)

      by afaik_ianal ( 918433 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2006 @01:41AM (#15530114)
      Mind you, the article title is a bit misleading. They said they are not seeing the impact of Ubuntu yet. They didn't say that they do not see them as threats.
      • Please correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't RedHat sell their maintenance services, and their training primarily? Even if Ubuntu steps into the enterprise market with a free product, I doubt their service will be free. Also RedHat has a well-recognized name in the linux enterprise market - it will take Ubuntu a great deal if time and effort to steal that mind and market share from RedHat -- plenty of time to 'react', or better yet improve their service and value.

        But I do agree that RedHat needs to beware o

        • Agree in general with parent post. I think comparing RH with MS or Ubuntu is an apples and oranges thing.

          It might be interesting to compare RH with Novell and IBM. All three are offering Linux support services to the same general market, and each is bringing a very different history and orientation to the party. But neither MS nor Ubuntu are directly addressing this market.

    • I am sure Microsoft said the same thing about Red Hat. Pride goes before a fall Red Hat.

      I don't think RedHat and Microsoft see themselves in direct competition to each other -- RedHat's focus is on the enterprise Unix market and competitors like Sun. That pisses Microsoft off because they were waiting for UNIX to collapse and the customers to come running to Windows. But RedHat hasn't done a thing to MS's existing markets.

      On the other hand, Ubuntu is very much potential competition to RedHat because the sof
      • Despite that, they don't really compete. Redhat is focused entirely on servers. They've deliberately avoided the 'desktop' market all along. Which is where Ubuntu is focused.

    • That's true, however Canonical will have an uphill battle in the enterprise desktop/server market against Red Hat.

      Consider - if you are wanting to deploy desktop Linux across your organisation for whatever reason, which name are you likely to trust more? Red Hat, a profitable, established company that has many (100+) developers recruited from the open source community supporting its products. Or Canonical, a very new entry into the game, funded primarily by the [finite] wealth of a millionaire, with on

    • Re:Just like MS (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mdfst13 ( 664665 )
      "I am sure Microsoft said the same thing about Red Hat. Pride goes before a fall Red Hat."

      I would take this more seriously if Red Hat were beating Microsoft on any significant measure. At best they might be winning the server OS market, which Microsoft never had. Microsoft has considerably more revenue and profit (something like a hundred times more).

      Anyway, there's no evidence that Microsoft and Red Hat compete. Red Hat mostly competes with unix providers (Sun, HP, etc.). Xandros and Mandrake are the o

  • Red Hat doesn't need to do much. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tapo ( 855172 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2006 @01:43AM (#15530122) Homepage
    I remember when tech websites were clamoring over the latest Fedora release as much as they're clamoring over Ubuntu now. Red Hat almost got it right, except for one thing.


    Fix your package manager!

    I am sick of downloading packages from weird websites, version conflicts, and typing this stupid and overly long command into the shell over and over, hoping - nay, praying - that RPM won't spit out another conflict error this time. YUM seems tacked on, and I've never gotten it to work properly.

    I switched to Ubuntu, even though it had less polish and was so deep in development, simply because application management actually worked, and things were in a logical order (supported, unsupported, universe, multiverse).

    Maybe it's not practical, maybe I'm talking out of my ass having not used a Red Hat operating system since Fedora Core 3, but it's the only thing that prevents me from using Fedora at home or on a server, and the only thing that prevents me from recommending it to friends.

    • Re:Red Hat doesn't need to do much. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by jmv ( 93421 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2006 @02:14AM (#15530211) Homepage
      Actually, my impression is that the main reason why installing random packages on Ubuntu just works, unlike Fedora, is that almost all applications now have been packaged (un universe/multiverse) for specific debian/ubuntu version, whereas you get random rpm that have been compiled on some random rpm-based distro that might have different libraries than you have.

      • Re:Red Hat doesn't need to do much. (Score:5, Informative)

        by cowbutt ( 21077 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2006 @03:11AM (#15530361) Journal
        That's exactly it.

        Fedora's catching up fast, but Debian and Gentoo are still in the lead with respect to the number of applications available within their main package repositories. That's why their package management tools appear to work better - it's actually down to all the hard work that's been put in by the package maintainers though; the tools are nothing special (rpm provides equal or better functionality to dpkgs and ebuilds, and apt is available for rpm as well as yum).

        The trouble is that the lesser number of packages for Fedora/RH encourages newbie and intermediate users to indiscriminately install packages from random places, with the expected results. If, however, you pick a handful of co-operative package repositories (e.g. dag + rpmforge only, or fedora extras + livna only, or ATrpms only), things work out pretty well. For packages that aren't available, it's best to learn to roll your own, either by porting packages from other versions/distros, or upgrading existing packages, or from scratch.

        • In order to get any packages that you really want to use in Fedora, you need to add on repositories. If you do that, you will wind up in dependency hell ... eventually. Hopefully some of these repos will combine and that will help.

          That said, I ditched Fedora and went to Ubuntu. Ubuntu/Debian and Gentoo have done this correct from the begining. It seems really tacked-on with Fedora.
          • In order to get any packages that you really want to use in Fedora, you need to add on repositories. If you do that, you will wind up in dependency hell ... eventually.

            In theory, yes, in practice no, as long as you stick to repos whose maintainers talk with each other. :-)

            For packages that you really want from an incompatible repo, you can temporarily enable the repo (on the yum command line even - no config file hacking necessary) at install time, but leave that repo disabled for the purposes of 'yum u

        • This post has got to be in my all time top ten. I've used FC3 for a couple years now, I guess, and yum etc. has been finicky as hell. I'm trying your tips.

          Question: "roll your own"? That sounds hard... is it hard? Where to start?

    • Me being a Gentoo user, what's a package manager? I ditched Red Hat when they stuck a knife in Red Hat 7, 8 and 9 which was right after I'd subscribed to their subscription update service for same, rendering it worthless, and never had a conflict since nor have I had to go searching for something in 5 different repositories.

      Gentoo certainly isn't for everyone but I REALLY like being able to just update stuff when I want to update stuff, and not get locked in to some distro's arbitrary release cycle. It rea
      • I am a hard core Gentoo and FreeBSD user, a casual Ubuntu user, and I occasionally bother with Fedora. (Read: I maintain 2 labs at Loyola University Chicago. We use Gentoo for the majority of our machines and in both of our clusters. We use Ubuntu on a small number of lab machines, and we hate our current temporary Fedora Core 4 installs in our linux lab.)

        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 t

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • How is the package manager relevant to the article? They are talking about cluster and high-performance computing - not about desktop OS's. RTFS (Read The Fucking Summary) please.
      • Cluster computing is all about CONSISTENCY.

        That's going to be far easier with a more robust package manager. Debian's approach to this is well suited for the problem. Bughat's is not.

        I would run my cluster on Debian (or Ubuntu) if my cluster app vendor supported it.

    • I remember when tech websites were clamoring over the latest Fedora release as much as they're clamoring over Ubuntu now. Red Hat almost got it right, except for one thing.

      Fix your package manager!

      I am sick of downloading packages from weird websites, version conflicts, and typing this stupid and overly long command into the shell over and over, hoping - nay, praying - that RPM won't spit out another conflict error this time. YUM seems tacked on, and I've never gotten it to work properly.

      I have

      • I have worked with both dpkg and rpm, and there is no question: rpm is vastly superior to dpkg, when it comes to building packages, checking what package a file belongs to, or verifying the installed software (can't do it with dpkg).

        Lets take these claims one at a time, shall we?

        • building packages Lets see, to build a package we just run apt-get build-dep foopkg; apt-get install build-essential fakeroot; apt-get source foopkg; cd foopkg-*; fakeroot debian/rules binary;. Hrm. That wasn't so hard...
    • Fix your package manager!

      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

    • Re:Red Hat doesn't need to do much. (Score:5, Informative)

      by joe 155 ( 937621 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2006 @05:23AM (#15530715) Journal
      well, the article isn't really about this, but as a fedora user I feel like I should at least counter some of your claims:

      YUM works very well in FC5, it has made keeping software up to date really easy, far more than on windows. everything does it pretty much strait away; so for me it's great. They do have a GUI one aswell, but that doesn't seem to be as fast and I like the information... so run it from the command line

      You also don't need to look through random websites, you already get 3 repositories with the distro, but it's really easy to add another (I've got livna) in there. These will contain pretty much all the software you could ever want to find

      you really should consider trying fedora again. it's such a good little OS. anyway, if you do you should go to http://www.fedorafaq.org/ [fedorafaq.org] it contains a load of helpful information about how to get everything going. Also, it's not fedora's fault that some proprietary stuff doesn't work out of the box - it's free speech and wants to stay that way - we really should be praising them for this, not condeming them because it might take a little more effort to get some things working. Anyway, give it a go.
      • Yum works pretty well, it may be slow, but its a huge improvement. The problem is that yum is useless with RHEL. With RHEL customers are stuck with up2date, which is completely lacking. FC5 is solid distro but your inclusion of a long FAQ showcases my issues with Fedora and many other distros. People should not have to read a FAQ to play movies, visit flash websites, and use Java applets. It should all work out of the box..
        • you say it should all work out of the box but the distro is totally free speech, so if you only used open stuff like ogg then it would all work out of the box. You can't really blame them for having principles even if they make it slightly more difficult for people - also with some stuff there is patent issues because of the crazy laws which exist in this area and not everyone is open source
  • An announcement today from Excite CEO Foo McBar stated that "We don't see google as a problem. They can't hurt us. Na na na na."

    RRRRiiiigggghhtttt... Microsoft may be a newcomer to the cluster market, but just because it's a Microsoft product doesn't mean it's "omg sux0r". Only time can tell if the new Windows cluster system will be decent. However, it is illogical (and bad business practice) for Red Hat to be "unconcerned" about new competition.
    • Keep in mind this is just a PR piece. I'm sure Redhat is all too aware of the threat from their competitors. But they'd be idiots to go to the media and say, "Yes, we're really worried about the new Microsoft offering because it is superior to ours in so many ways." They will (and should) always talk down their competition externally. It is internally that they need to react to and manage the threat.
    • Two words for you. Microsoft Certification. It will all depend on the market demand and people who are certified for MS cluster. Think, Microsoft ISA.

    • Microsoft may be a newcomer to the cluster market, but just because it's a Microsoft product doesn't mean it's "omg sux0r".

      No, it means that just about anything that you would ever want to run on a cluster has never been ported to a Microsoft OS and for some based on the linux experience it would take a few years to do so once it is decided that it is worthwhile to do it. Without the software there really isn't much point.

      I'm probably biased because I putting in a few unpaid extra hours at the moment to r

    • Even if Windows cluster became the best solution for HPC clustering, it would require a lot of ISV support. I haven't been around HPC systems in about four months, but I gather that it would take a while to get all of the major players to beef up their Windows support and tuning to get close to their Unix/Linux base.

      At my last job, we had around 500 or so compute nodes at our site (more globally). The system we wrote to manage the jobs was seriously tailored to a Unix-like platform. It would also be non-tri
    • Only time can tell if the new Windows cluster system will be decent.

      Decent or not, I think it will be as difficult for MS to break into the high performance market as it is for Linux to break into the desktop market. Lets look at desktops:

      1. All the relevent people know how to use and administer Windows
      2. Theres a big, well established library of software for Windows (yes, there are usually equivalents under Linux but they aren't well known established industry tools as far as most users are concerned).

      Now

  • Microsoft has been into clustering for years. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 14, 2006 @01:53AM (#15530158)
    Years and years and years.

    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.
  • While I think ubuntu is really, really great, I don't see it offering any more of a challenge to RedHat than debian does; quite on the contrary, in fact, since ubuntu focuses on the desktop while RedHat and debian focus on the server (I know debian doesn't *officially* focus on the server, but still...).

    As for MS, well, they are usually able to strike a balance between "does not suck TOO much" and "has microsoft on the name" that appeals to a lot of people, even on corporate servers etc. Still, maybe the HP
  • When a company admits the competition is a threat, wake me up.

    In most cases confessing a threat means your competition has just as good or better product. If the company can't claim some other detail like monopoly abuse or control over distribution channels or whatever, they will just publically "dismiss" the threat, but you know they are working frantically to fight it, and having really bad nightmares every night about it.

    The most ridiculous example of this "strategy" recently was the public mocking of th

  • Gandhi (Score:5, Funny)

    by Turmio ( 29215 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2006 @02:23AM (#15530230) Homepage

    • First they ignore you <- we're here, folks!
    • Then they fight y...
    Oh, wait... You say it's RedHat ignoring Microsoft and not the other way around??

  • Microsoft and Ubuntu not a threat (Score:5, Insightful)

    by layer3switch ( 783864 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2006 @02:25AM (#15530239)
    For instance, they need to achieve a "critical mass" of users before hardware and software vendors certify their products against any Linux distribution, he explained.

    Ubuntu market and RHEL market is totally different. Ubuntu is "now" heading toward Enterprise desktop environment with support, but Ubuntu had and always has been about average joe's Desktop PC while RHEL had and always has been about heavily toward Enterprise customers. So I think, by reading the article, it looks like RH is taking Ubuntu as not a competitor, but rather as a grassroot movement trying to reach that "critical mass". And to be fair, Crenshaw did point out a very good point here. That is, popularity doesn't count for the vendor certification which is the industry embracing OS distro with hardware and software for better customer support and that is what Enterprise customers look for.

    Microsoft being in cluster market so late in the game, it's fair to say that MS had failed to grab the market share early on. So the statement in the article is accurate. Who knows if MS will monopolize cluster market share in coming years? But this statement is on the bull's eye.

    "Linux is often associated with high-performance computing, but Windows has never achieved that on a large scale."

    This has been the case for Microsoft. When Win2k Data Center edition was coming out, I was hoping better support for complete cluster suite, but wasn't satisfied with MS's offering with half baked solution and limitations. Besides, call me crazy, but 200+ cluster nodes, there is no way single Windows cluster node installation will be easier than a kickstart/NFS/bash script of RHEL cluster node. I don't know, maybe there is similar thing for Windows... I'm not a Windows guy, so I'm not sure. Please do correct me.
    • Ubuntu market and RHEL market is totally different. Ubuntu is "now" heading toward Enterprise desktop environment with support, but Ubuntu had and always has been about average joe's Desktop PC while RHEL had and always has been about heavily toward Enterprise customers.

      Ubuntu right now is your classic dotcom strategy -- blow through venture capital to get "eyeballs" and then figure out later how to build revenue out of that. And if Ubuntu can't figure it out, they end up just like Mandrake and Corel and al
      • Paid support you say ???

        Sounds like that is exactly where they are going

        http://www.ubuntu.com/support/paid [ubuntu.com]

        just like say

        Fedora / CentOS --> RHEL

        or

        OpenSUSE --> SUSE Linux Enterprise Server

        or

        OpenSolaris --> Solaris

        , seems like they are all working on the

        "here try our stuff for free!" approach , closely followed by the "but if you want business/ enterprise support, well you can pay for that"

        no such thing as a free lunch , but there is nothing like free advertising.

        Note : yes i know CentOS isnt fedora,
        • seems like they are all working on the "here try our stuff for free!" approach , closely followed by the "but if you want business/ enterprise support, well you can pay for that"

          So you'd rather they provide no support at all? That's a bit silly. You sound like you're allergic to anything related to money. You should probably get that checked out.
        • True, but RedHat, SUSE, and Solaris are all established products. Ubuntu still has to figure out how to find customers that want to pay for it.
          • **but RedHat, SUSE, and Solaris are all established products. Ubuntu still has to figure out how to find customers that want to pay for it.**

            While this is true and i do agree with you. you still need to pay for those products up front.

            unless i am missing something the support service offered by Ubuntu / Canonical ( spl ) are support contracts .. the products are still free to use up front, and you only pay for support if you have a problem or want support for a large project.

            this still leans towards comunit
            • When the rubber hits the road, RedHat is making their money from selling long-lifecycle stability and patch support, and not telephone support. Businesses like to keep the same setups for years at a time (think Windows 2000), and RH charges for the privledge.

              It's great that Ubuntu offers a support service, but they're not really going to build a profitable business that way. It's going to come down to how well they successfully market their business products. Or, maybe as another poster pointed out, it's a
      • Ubuntu right now is your classic dotcom strategy -- blow through venture capital to get "eyeballs" and then figure out later how to build revenue out of that. And if Ubuntu can't figure it out, they end up just like Mandrake and Corel and all the other Linux Desktop business failures that have been forgotten about.

        Ubuntu has a $10 million foundation [wikipedia.org] behind it to provide for the future development of Ubuntu should Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, keel over. A major difference between Ubuntu and the f
        • Not to mention the fact that Ubuntu is little more than a dressed up form of the most pervasive gratis-ware Linux distribution. It's the whole Redhat->Fedora thing but in reverse. The core distro has actually been around as long as Redhat and benefits from the greater maturity of the Debian development process.

      • Can we say it...

        Total. RedHat. Apologism.

        No. Ubuntu Linux IS real product now (and also well thought-out ideas for profit), because it has stuff which works [tm], so in my opinion, it can't be compared with any dot com example. About money - you propably don't get it how BIG is Debian in Enterprise. Just because it had no serious commercial entity so far, doesn't mean that it doesn't have market share. It could even larger than RedHat.

        So, no. Ubuntu is DIRECT competitor to RedHat, because it is RedHat fault

      • Re:Microsoft and Ubuntu not a threat (Score:4, Interesting)

        by asuffield ( 111848 ) <asuffield@suffields.me.uk> on Wednesday June 14, 2006 @04:46AM (#15530614)
        Ubuntu right now is your classic dotcom strategy -- blow through venture capital to get "eyeballs" and then figure out later how to build revenue out of that.

        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.
      • Corel Linux [xandros.com] seems to be doing OK, especially with the likes of HP pushing their product these days.

      • So, unless something has changed in the last few years, Ubuntu is going to have to do the same -- go where the money is (corporations) or die.

        As long as Mark Shuttleworth is willing to pour his not-inconsiderable personal fortune into Ubuntu, they're not going to be hurting for money.

        Shuttleworth said in his Slashdot interview [slashdot.org] that he views Ubuntu almost as a not-for-profit:

        I'd very much like to make the distro project sustainable, because I've never had the privilege to work with such talented

  • Anyone who has used Ubuntu lately on a desktop or a laptop can tell you that it is a strong altnernative to Red Hat. Red Hat will ignore Ubuntu at its peril.

  • Microsoft? Not a huge market.. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Liquid-Gecka ( 319494 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2006 @03:04AM (#15530337)
    I run Beowulf Clusters for a living.. Three to be exact. Two run Gentoo and one runs Mac OS. I see Mac OS as a far more likely product in clusters than Microsoft. And even then Mac OS is missing huge chunks of functionality in the cluster world. Checkpointing is broken using Condor and there is no third party apps for Grid Engine. Most programs fail to compile without some massaging. Often programs attempt to compile against native libraries rather than X11. This prevents remote users from using the apps.

    Even with all of this though programs can be made to work. I have something like 100 custom programs that needed installed on my clusters. NCBI tools, Bio apps, stuff like that. All of them are coded to Unix environments. Compiling them on windows would be a total pain in the butt! I keep hearing that new programs will be made to work but I don't see that happening all that much. Most new programs are forks of old programs. (At least in the Bio/Geo worlds.) I still have TONS of fortran stuff out there. Lots and lots of stuff that only compiles against GCC 2.95. These things need modified in order to work with a newer version of the SAME OS.. you think a total change is going to happen?

    Plus.. The cost of the OS can be killer. When you are talking $1200-$3400 a node an added $500 is huge! Our Mac OS cluster cost us $50k in software licenses. And its 50 nodes. Even if Microsoft drops the price to $100 a pop that is still REALLY expensive. $100 a pop across 50 nodes pays for a bunch more nodes!

    So I guess what I am saying is that unless Microsoft starts writing tons of its own apps it won't break into the cluster world very fast. They will be luck to grow as fast as Apple has (%1 of the top 500 list in 4 years).

  • One thing I find commical.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by pavera ( 320634 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2006 @03:19AM (#15530378) Homepage Journal
    Ok, MS just released Cluster Server 2003... Um is my clock set right? It is 2006 right?

    What now in 3 years they are going to release Cluster Server 2005....

    And we're supposed to be worried about it? Their software is admittedly at least 3 years behind the times right there in the title of the software it says so.

  • Nightmares... (Score:4, Funny)

    by gummyb34r ( 899393 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2006 @04:10AM (#15530521)
    1) The right way of spamming the world: A top 100 cluster under Microsoft OS control gets a I.Love.U2 virus
    2) An interactive assistant - Microsoft PaperClip  - grows fast and takes the world under its control
    3) Finally Vista runs at decent speed. Modest Min Sys Req - a cluster
    4) The_Big_Bang_simulation.vbp

  • This is silly (Score:2, Insightful)

    by __aahlyu4518 ( 74832 )
    Try it the other way around

    Microsoft Windows is often associated with desktop computing, but Linux has never achieved that on a large scale.

    So RedHat is basically saying that (RH)Linux will never ever be able compete on the desktop. Then why are they putting all the effort in it?
  • I see lots of comments here about MS being an also-ran in the cluster market. And there are lots more comments about how MS will "leverage their monopoloy" or their huge cash hoard to ultimately succeed in clusters. What I think everyone is missing is the role tools will play in this market. In my opinion, whichever cluster OS has the best development tools that make it easy to develop cluster-based applications will be the hands-down winner. And in that space I think you have to bet on MS enjoying a seriou

  • What is the problem? (Score:3, Informative)

    by deadline ( 14171 ) on Wednesday June 14, 2006 @09:10AM (#15531492) Homepage
    Red Hat does not offer a competing product, so what is the problem? There are many "cluster distributions" out there, but neither Red Hat, Suse, or any other major vendor have a well integrated cluster version of Linux. There are things like Rocks [rocksclusters.org], Oscar [openclustergroup.org], Warewulf [warewulf-cluster.org], and companies like Scalable Informatics [scalableinformatics.com], or Basement Supercomputing [basement-s...puting.com] are there if you need help.
  • I've made a few very long-term predictions that have come true... like the unilateral pullout from Gaza and the security fence/wall.

    Here's another: RedHat and Microsoft will both be seriously damaged by Ubuntu.

    Reasons why:

    - Opensource is the only trend Microsoft can't fight with money. As technology progresses, some applications (such as Netscape, Office, and Windows) become mature, old technologies, with little money left to go after. That's when open-source takes over. I'm a Microsoft fan, but I see t

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