SLES support vs. HP-UX support

[Adam Garsha]

Hey. After looking throught the SLES 10 docs, it looks like we could save millions in hardware and software licensing (literally) by moving to SLES. My concern is support.

1. Do you use SLES and if so, do you have an HP "support plus" or "critical support" or "mission critical" enterprise support contract with HP? When you call about a Suse issue, do you talk directly to Suse or do you talk to HP? Do you talk to Suse via HP or is your OS support contract with Suse (and HP takes a "hands-off" approach)? In short, please discuss the route you take to get OS support and comment on rough spots.

2. How has your support compared with other enterprise UNIX'es; specifically HP-UX or Tru64?

3. Do you find that "things" seem buggier with enterprise apps on Linux vs. HP-UX or Tru64? More crashes, memory management issues, I/O and driver issues?

4. Did you discover any hidden management costs when moving from a proprietary UNIX on proprietary hardware to enterprise Linux. For example, how smooth is patching? Namely, have you applied SP1/2 or 3 for SLES 9?; if so, how would you rate your experiences vs. a Tru64 or HP-UX cumulative patch apply?

Please no religion or zealotry--I don't care about that. I seek to know about enterprise Linux experiences soley because I see the pricepoint for enterprise features to be more windows-like vs. "big-iron"-UNIX-like... i.e. huge difference in price for hardware and software licensing and support. 100 to 1 difference (at least).

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

Shalom,

1) To get Linux support from HP you must purchase it. In my opinion, it is the finest support you can get. There are experts all over the world. HP-UX software support contracts do not cover this. Support arrangements vary from country to country, I'm referring to my US and Israel experience.

2) I think that support from HP is the industry standard. It far outdoes improved support I've recently received from Oracle. It puts Dell and many other vendors to shame.

3) Really have not experienced much of that. We test rather thoroughly, but we've had limited issues in production. Sometimes they are caused by Microsoft product integration.

4) Red Hat is more expensive than HP-UX. If you buy an HP-9000 or Integrity server the actual license cost is $300 and you don't have to pay again. Red Hat Support, which is required to use the software is twice as expsensive on the Enterprise level and has top be renewed every year. Support contract costs are pretty much equal. Add to that that production Red Hat code is not up to HP-UX quality and you have some serious decisions to make. HP-UX has been in the 64 bit world for four major releases and that shows.

Bottom line is Enterprise support comes at Enterprise prices. Its really about the same overall and I've noticed hardware support on the HP-9000/Integrity World is much better than the 32/64 bit platform that was originally designed for Wintel.

SEP

[Adam Garsha]

When you add on all the licensing for HP-UX features like MirrorDisk, ServiceGuard, Veritas Storage Management, media, etc. I think that HP-UX is much more costly for software then Suse with includes all those features out-of-the-box. I also believe that support is many times more costly. Perhaps you get what you pay for... but that is why I am posting... I want to hear peoples' experiences with Suse Linux on HP Proliant hardware (in an HP SAN environment).

Namely, if windows on proliant is stable enough to support some of our production systems... then Suse Enterprise on proliant may be stable enough and we can move from $30K for an HP-UX pizza box to $5K per maxed out Suse/AMD blade.

I still am unclear about whether if I buy a support contract for Enterprise Linux for a proliant, will HP answer my calls or will I be calling Suse directly. (Frankly, I'd rather it be HP so that I can avoid any "its the other guy" support stack situations.)

I still want to here about folks that have Suse in production (and also have worked with other enterprise support from HP, so that they can tell me how support compares).

I am not interested in Suse on Itanium. I am interested in Suse on AMD.

[Adam Garsha]

p.s. I'll give points in a few days. I appreciate all responses.

[Thomas J. Harrold]

I have experience with RedHat support (direct through RedHat), and I've found that it is not as good as what I've come to expect from HP. I actually used HP to finally solve my problem. (why RHEL wouldn't boot to an Itanium server, with a particular raid card installed)

I am using Linux to replace less-critical servers. I'll leave my clusters on HP-UX/MC-SG, but I use Linux for Quorum Servers, DNS servers, Proxy servers, etc. I feel comfortable using Linux for servers that can be load-balanced, or have a backup server, in case of a failure.

I have seen that Linux is very reliable when used properly. My former company has been trying to use Linux running heavily loaded database applications (db2, oracle), and have been having some issues with vendor support. (ie online backup agents not supported in conjunction with Linux and db2, etc...)

Be sure to check out supportability for ALL of your software packages, including backup SW, and management SW (openview, BMC, etc..)

-tjh

[dan dobbs]

For us, the switch to Red Hat from HP-UX was easy, from a budgetary standpoint. We were paying tens of thousands of dollars for software/hardware support on our N-class. We replaced it with a loaded DL380 and a MSA-1000 running Red Hat enterprise 3 and are having great results, at a fraction of the price (and rack space!).

After that success, we moved off of our L-1000 on to another DL380 for our Veritas backup services. Works great, and requires a lot less rack space and power---plus it came with built-in gig ethernet! :)

best of luck,

-DD

[Adam Garsha]

Nobody else? There must be hundreds of you that have mixed HP shops.

[Colin Topliss]

I'm running SuSE in a mixed environment (Sun and HP primarily). The versions are primarily SLES9 SP3 at the moment (on Proliant), with some SuSE10. There are a number of things that have come along that have been deployed on Linux in the production environment (we take each project on a case by case basis and choose the best fit - usually anyway).

Our support is dealt with via HP (under a site contract). Any calls would be logged with them.

Haven't had to raise a call specifically against Linux yet, but have done against ServiceGuard on Linux (with mixed results).

Patching is nice and easy (at least it is the way I have it set up here). The problems you will face really would be more to do with whatever application you install (especially if it has to build kernel modules). Installing kernel patches may (or may not) affect such applications. Its comparable to HP's method of patching in so far as you can do it on the command line and via a GUI, and patch from local directories or a central depot server.

For the most part, the O/S seems very stable. The only major problems I have had have really been down to the hardware failing (on my 3rd system board in a particular DL380 for example).

From an app point of view, if there is something I need to compile, under Linux its a dream (its very rare that I get a compilation problem). Under HP-UX its usually a real pain.

Just some of my thoughts :-)

Colin