Red Hat as a model of Open Source stability

Introduction

On October 13, 2011, a conference on the opening of a Red Hat representative office in Russia was held in Moscow. Since the opening of the representative office, the company has already acquired a fairly large number of partners in Russia, including the basic Red Hat Ready Partner status.

The decision to enter into a partnership with Red Hat was made by us because of the growing interest of customers to the company's products (RHEL, JBoss, RHEV ...). After receiving the partnership, we were granted several licenses for our own use, testing, familiarization. After working for a couple of months under RHEL 6.3 in a test environment, we had a positive impression of the stability of this distribution, and frequent updates and bugfixes did not leave indifferent even the biggest skeptics.
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In spite of the fact that everything is so good and rosy, we have found some confusion on the net about building solutions based on Red Hat in Russia (not in corporate environments), since there are practically none. Most likely this is explained by the fact that nowhere really there is no information on the topic “how much does red hat cost and what does it include”, everyone is accustomed to, that Red Hat is RHEL, and RHEL is just a paid distribution. Let's consider this question on the basis of RHEL.

Licensing policy

Since Red Hat solutions are based on Open Source products, it cannot sell software licenses in the standard sense. But for what then does Red Hat take money? And he takes money for the software support service. In other words, it takes responsibility for ensuring that your system will always receive timely, stable updates and bug fixes.

Below is a table with summary information for each type of subscription:

		Without support		Standard		Premium
Working hours		Not available		Working time		Working hours (24x7 for level 1 and 2)
Support channel		Not available		Website and phone		Website and phone
Number of requests		Not		Not limited		Not limited
Response time		Primary and subsequent		Primary and subsequent		Primary	Subsequent
Level 1		Not available		1 working hour		1 hour	1 hour
Level 2		Not available		4 business hours		2 hours	4 hours
Level 3		Not available		1 working day		4 business hours	8 working hours
Level 4		Not available		2 working days		8 working hours	2 working days

Support

In addition to the subscription, there is also support, or rather, by purchasing a subscription, you also get support, and not just updates for the system.
Support determines the complete product support. At the moment, RHEL has the longest release support, namely, it can reach 13 years (10 years of release support + you can get another 3 years of additional support).

The main release support cycle now consists of 3 phases, namely:

Phase 1

This phase lasts about five and a half years and includes:

• release of minor versions;
• correction of critical errors;
• security updates;
• adding support for new equipment;
• updated images for installation.

Phase 2

This phase lasts about a year and includes:

• correction of critical errors;
• security updates;
• improving the support of existing equipment, adding support for new equipment is not performed;
• minor releases are an assembly of released updates for a release version.

Phase 3

This final phase lasts about three and a half years and includes only:

• correction of critical errors;
• selective security updates.

Additional support

This phase can be extended for an additional three years, but apart from maintaining access to the already released software and knowledge base, it does not include anything.

Summary table

	Phase 1	Phase 2	Phase 3	EL
Access to RHN	there is	there is	there is	there is
Access to the knowledge base	there is	there is	there is	there is
Technical support	Not limited	Not limited	Not limited	Missing
Security updates	there is	there is	there is	Not
Bug fixes	there is	there is	there is	Not
Minor releases	there is	there is	Not	Not
New hardware support	there is	Limited	Not	Not
New features and improvements	there is	Limited	Not	Not
Updated install images	there is	Not	Not	Not

Conclusion

At the moment, Red Hat, and in particular RHEL, is seen as a promising product. Are you ready to pay for a stable open source? Are you interested in the RHEL rental service on your servers?

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