[Novalug] Red Hat Network (RHN) technical information -- WAS: The "value" proposition of Red Hat

Bryan J. Smith b.j.smith@ieee.org
Mon May 10 14:48:15 EDT 2010


From: James Ewing Cottrell 3rd <JECottrell3@comcast.net>
> There is Nothing New of Substance in CentOS that is not in RHEL,
> unless you count centosplus and contrib repos.

And The Fedora(TM) Project provides Extra Packages for Enterprise
Linux (EPEL) as well.  There are many community repositories built
around EL.  RPM Fusion is yet another.

Fedora(TM) is community.  Red Hat(R) is commercial.  A tale of two
trademarks.  CentOS(TM) is yet another, independent trademark, one
that is not associated with or under any control of Red Hat(R) at all.
It's crucial to put all that together.

10 out of 10 people in 2003 admitted to me that their #1 complaint
was that they couldn't go to their boss and say they were installing
Red Hat(R) any more.  Most of the other comments I've heard about
2003 were wholly untrue, and I did a lot of FUD-busting back then.

> But what exactly is Red Hat Selling? I see three things:
> [1] Trademarked Art Work.
> [2] RHN
> [3] Support

Again, it's:  
1.  Entitlements (Subscriptions and Service Level Agreements, SLAs)
2.  Training
3.  Services

> I see the first two as Essentially Useless.  One set of images works
> pretty much the same as another, and YUM repos are just as good
> as RHN ones.

I used Canonical as an example before.  I'll use it again here to make
a similar point.  Have you used Landscape?  Litmus test:  How does
Landscape differ from APT repos?

Red Hat Network (RHN) and RHN Satellite Server are provisioning,
deployment and management solutions, not merely just for updates.  It
is also a dynamic software repository, not a static HTTP dumping ground.

Fedora(TM) Spacewalk exists as RHN's community upstream as of 2008.

> I, for one, would be happy to pay Red Hat *if they would support
> CentOS*. They are essentially the same, and RHEL makes things
> somewhat inconvenient to use.

Again ...

Fedora(TM) is community.  Red Hat(R) is commercial.  A tale of two
trademarks.  CentOS(TM) is yet another, independent trademark, one
that is not associated with or under any control of Red Hat(R) at all.
Again, it's crucial to put all that together.  ;)

> The License Key is a PITA to administer.

There is an "Entitlement" for a Subscription and/or SLA.

Red Hat has _never_ done run-time platform enforcement.  In fact,
for Red Hat customers that were hit with the VMware snafu back in
fall of 2008, I penned this entry at Red Hat to much praise internally
and externally:  

"The Liability of License Enforcement" (Red Hat "Truth Happens"):  
http://truthhappens.redhat.com/2008/08/13/the-liability-of-license-enforcement/  

With the unified distribution of EL5+, there is an Installation Code.  It
exists so people can install only what they have Entitlement for, whether
it's a Subscription and/or a Service Level Agreements (SLA).  That way
someone doesn't have a production Red Hat Cluster Suite installed
only to find out they aren't entitled to support on it some 6 months down
the road because they only have the $50 bundled server product.  ;)
 
People can still _by-pass) it and install _everything_.  The Installation
Code is there to help them install only what they are entitled to.
As I mentioned in the article ...

  On-line, run-time license management
  Off-line, run-time license enforcement.
  Empower your customer.

> Gee, why can't we choose out OWN Key ...
> say the MAC or the IP address? We'd still need to Register, but now
> we have One Less Chore to bother with.
> Hmmm, is that all I object to? Maybe So.

You can with RHN.  You can generate Activation Keys and name it
whatever you want.  It then tracks what entitlements are utilized by
systems, so organizations can know exactly what they are using,
the SLAs on the systems, etc...

An organization under RHN can have multiple, different tiers of SLAs.

People are free to re-appropriate entitlements as they see fit, to
whatever systems they want, with_out_ contacting Red Hat.  It's all
managed with RHN, among other system details.

RHN is a tool for customers to help themselves.
The installation codes / activation keys help provision entitlements.
They can also be assigned after installation/registration too.

Have you used RHN?  Satellite?
Or how about Canonical Landscape?  Novell Zen?  Others?
There are many management systems out there.  RHN is just one.



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