bashton Business Focused Open Source

All of the Linux distributions covered in this article are suitable for enterprise use. Some have a longer track record than others, but ultimately, provided they are managed in the right way all should be stable and reliable.
The decision on which distribution to use may well come down to which your staff have most familiarity with. Red Hat has a strong training and certification programme, which is useful for those organisations who do not already have in-house skills. However, all the distributions here have far more similarities than differences, and skills learnt on one distribution can quickly be applied to the next.

Here are the main factors we believe companies should look at when choosing a distribution:

• How long is the server expected to be in operation for? Does the distribution's support schedule cover all of this?
• What in-house knowledge does your organisation already have? How easy will it be to train new staff?
• Are there any applications you wish to run that are not provided with a distribution (eg Oracle)? Which distributions do these applications support?

Finally, here's a brief recap on all the distributions with some comments.

Red Hat Enterprise

Red Hat is probably the 'safest' choice amongst those listed here. Red Hat is the best known brand, and has the longest support time frame. SELinux means that, if used correctly, this should be the most secure operating system here, although the system is undoubtedly hard to get to grips with. Red Hat Network is an invaluable tool for those with several servers to manage. Whilst not expensive, it's not free - the bare minimum version, a copy of Red Hat Enterprise Basic without telephone support, costs £195. In reality, this price is likely to be dwarfed by the hardware and support costs whatever distribution or Operating System is used, but nonetheless this is certainly a consideration, particularly in a 'credit-crunch' world.

CentOS

For those wanting the long support lifetime of Red Hat but without the cost, CentOS is the obvious choice. Its binary compatibility with Red Hat means that applications which support RHEL will run without any modifications. On the downside, there's no vendor provided support available, and it's missing the Red Hat Network, which is a very useful tool for any organisation with more than a couple of servers.

Ubuntu

Of the five, Ubuntu is probably the most immature - but it's also the fastest growing, particular with a large number of desktop users. Domination of the desktop was the path that Microsoft took towards carving out a strong server market which had previously been dominated by the commercial UNIX vendors, and it's very possible that Ubuntu could do the same. Ubuntu is however extremely dependant on Debian for many of its packages, and a lot depends on the potentially precarious relationship with the Debian community.

Debian

A large support package repository and high availability of community support mean that Debian is a solid choice for any network. There is undoubtedly a feeling in the Debian community that Ubuntu has merely taken their work, tarted it up and stolen all the credit, and there is some concern that Debian is fading because of this. However, with a huge team of volunteer contributors, it would take more than a few dissatisified contributors to stop the project. The unknown length of security updates (12 months after the next release) creates difficulties when planning server longevity.

SuSE Enterprise

SuSE has a small but committed fan-base of users, however it seems to be inevitably losing market share to the other distributions. Novell have started the OpenSuSE project to try and encourage community involvement, however they have met with only very limited success. There have been concerns over agreements Novell have signed with Microsoft which have alienated SuSE from the rest of the Open Source community. For those using other distributions, SuSE lacks a strong reason for users to switch.

Comments and Feedback

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About Bashton

Bashton are a Linux and Open Source software consultancy and support company based in Manchester, England. We provide support for all the distributions mentioned here, and our staff are key members of the Open Source community, contributing code to a wide range of projects. We also offer training courses. For more information or to request a callback, please see our contact page.