Linux and Open Source

Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols & Paula Rooney
Home / News & Blogs / Linux and Open Source

Red Hat's extended support option offers breathing room

By | August 24, 2010, 10:32am PDT

Red Hat is taking good care of its customers — and that’s one of the intended benefit of open source software.

The Linux giant recently announced that it would offer an optional subscription to extend the life cycle support to 10 years for its enterprise Linux.

The current life cycle is seven years. But with the Extended Life Cycle Support, customers can get limited software maintenance and technical support for three more years.

The extended support option is available for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and RHEL 4 and will soon be available for RHEL 5. (RHEL 6 is now in beta testing).

It’s a wise move in this economic climate. There are a number of Red Hat customers who deployed Enterprise Linux 3 seven years ago and were facing an end-of-life date of October 2010.

Now, if they buy the add-on subscription, they can hold off on the upgrade cycle until 2013.

This is one of the key benefits of open source. Red Hat does not own or control Linux and knows that customers can fairly easily defect to another Linux brand if they feel pushed around.

It also gives Red Hat some revenue boost to offset the longer upgrade cycles of Enterprises.

Red Hat claims this extended support option is the best in the Linux industry.

Microsoft’s mainstream life cycle support for its business software is five years. The company does offer extended support for an additional five years but it covers only security updates. Technical support and hotfix support is paid only. \

there is no free technical support

Kick off your day with ZDNet's daily e-mail newsletter. It's the freshest tech news and opinion, served hot. Get it.

More from “Linux and Open Source”

Topics

Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat Inc., Support Option, Linux, Open Source, UNIX, Operating Systems, Software, Paula Rooney

Paula Rooney is a Boston-based writer who has followed the tech industry for almost two decades.

Disclosure

Paula Rooney

Paula Rooney owns no stock in the companies that she covers. She holds a 401K that is managed by JPMorgan.

Biography

Paula Rooney

Paula Rooney has covered the technology industry for more than 15 years, starting with semiconductor design and mini-computer systems at EDN News and later focused on PC software companies including Microsoft, Lotus, Oracle, Red Hat, Novell and other open source and commercial software companies for CRN and PCWeek. She received a silver award from the American Society of Business Publication Editors in 2005 for her profile on Linus Torvalds and edited and co-authored "Partnering With Microsoft," a book about Microsoft's channel published by CMP Publishing in 2004. Rooney graduated from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1997. In her off time, she enjoys scuba diving, sailing, sun worshipping, running and reading. She resides on the shores of Scituate, Massachusetts.

Talkback Most Recent of 6 Talkback(s)

  • Yeah, great but it's not cheap!
    That extended support will run you $2,500/year/server!!! So during a period of 10 years, you've spent $9100 ($1,300/year/server) for the first 7 years then $7,500 the last 3. So those servers are $15,600 each in addition to the original investment?! Yeah, isn't "open source" grand in this "economic climate"?
    ZDNet Gravatar
    jmiller1978
    24th Aug 2010
  • RE: Red Hat's extended support option offers breathing room
    @jmiller1978

    Upgrading is free. You can hoop from RHEL 3 directly to RHEL 6 using same regular yearly subscription. If you want to stay on RHEL 3, it is going to cost. Or you can support yourself and tell RH to go jump. But it is going to cost you even more.

    Not like you have all those choices with Microsoft. When they end support, you must pay full price of new Vista7 or you are hosed.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    gnufreex
    24th Aug 2010
  • RE: Red Hat's extended support option offers breathing room
    @gnufreex

    When they end support, you must pay full price of new Vista7 or you are hosed.

    Wow, great doomsday scenario. Somewhere I envision Ballmer sitting on a highback chair with a hairless cat uttering a villianous laugh. "I want sharks with freakin' laser beams on their head!" With software assurance, I get all that and a bag of chips and it ends up cheaper than RH plus I don't have to only install items from RH's repositories to stay within support.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    jmiller1978
    25th Aug 2010
  • RE: Red Hat's extended support option offers breathing room
    Red Hat is taking good care of its about it is bank that website attacked from the site support from any soldier site to the light home page is great customers
    ZDNet Gravatar
    musdahi
    19th Sep
  • RE: Red Hat's extended support option offers breathing room
    @jmiller1978 RH is not the only OpenSource vendor... There is Canonical, Novell, Oracle... the last 2 even have a RH-> Migration program...
    ZDNet Gravatar
    petarro
    24th Aug 2010
  • RE: Red Hat's extended support option offers breathing room
    Any company that have not prepared to jump ship to the next supported version (in a *normal* lifecycle, not extended) is doing something wrong. I know, I work for such company. It's a Catch-22 situation... since they don't want to spend cash upgrading systems and hardware, they want to stay with the same systems so they pay extended support. Since extended support costs 2-4x (depending on the *NIX vendor), they are further without cash to afford anything new.... which leads them to want to stay with what they have even more.

    In my opinion vendors are right to ask for more money, those engineers supporting 10-year old software must be paid. It's the companies' job to avoid this situation and plan accordingly....

    It's a total mistake to plan the life cycle of your services based on extended support plans for the products they are based on. When the regular support lifecycle ends... it's ENDED. Extended support is for mismanaged environment (or something so critical like a nuclear power plant or airport systems.. I doubt many people have those).
    ZDNet Gravatar
    gtirloni
    9th Jun

Talkback - Tell Us What You Think

Formatting +
BB Codes - Note: HTML is not supported in forums
  • [b] Bold [/b]
  • [i] Italic [/i]
  • [u] Underline [/u]
  • [s] Strikethrough [/s]
  • [q] "Quote" [/q]
  • [ol][*] 1. Ordered List [/ol]
  • [ul][*] · Unordered List [/ul]
  • [pre] Preformat [/pre]
  • [quote] "Blockquote" [/quote]

The best of ZDNet, delivered

ZDNet Newsletters

Get the best of ZDNet delivered straight to your inbox

Facebook Activity

Blog Roll

Blog Archive

White Papers, Webcasts, & Resources