redhat vs. suse

[Fraser Campbell]

Kyle O'Donnell wrote:

> We have finally made a decision to bring linux in our environment.  I
> have been asked to choose an enterprise level distribution. In terms
> of support and market share the decision was narrowed to Redhat and
> Suse.  We plan on using linux on both distributed and mainframe(ibm
> zseries) systems.  Typically Redhat has owned the distributed and Suse
> the mainframe.  I've used both extensively in the past and find Suse's
> support superior.  I have found that Redhat makes a better product;
> not to say one distro is technically superior, but its suite of tools
> is easier to use.
> 
> Has anyone else been asked to make a similar decision.  Can you direct
> me to some srticles on the topic?

I did not make the decision but I'm just leaving an engagement that had a 
large number of SuSE deployments.  This was my first exposure to SuSE and 
as far as the distros go I don't have much preference, they all have their 
peculiarities.

Where SuSE is still losing out I think is support for third part software, 
Oracle and lots of smaller software vendors.  There I saw that 
documentation and expectations were all heavily tilted towards Redhat. 
Vendors that did support SuSE were often fixated on SLES8 despite SLES9 
having been around for ages and SLES10 being just around the corner.

I would look at the software you are going to be running primarily and see 
if it looks like one choice or the other might offer you advantages.  SuSE 
is catching up on the vendor support but it's still not up to Redhat 
support levels as far as I see.

-- 
Fraser Campbell <fraser-Txk5XLRqZ6CsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org>                 http://www.wehave.net/
Georgetown, Ontario, Canada                               Debian GNU/Linux
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