On Fri, 31 Jul 2009, Neil Neely wrote:
Has anyone on the list done a cost benefit analysis of Red Hat vs Cent OS?$WORK is a very cost conscious environment so I didn't ever do any serious evaluation of Red Hat, but found I have really liked Cent OS. I'd love to hear from anyone who has operated both and any insight you can share on this topic.
in my opinion the biggest reason to run Cent OS is if you need bug compatibility with Red Hat for some reason.
most commonly this is if you have some Red Hat servers and need to test things that you will put there, but don't want to pay for the licenses.
the other common reason is if you need to run some application that only runs on Red Hat and you want more confidence that it will run, even if you are techincally unsupported by running on Cent OS (or is only supported on Red Hat and Cent OS)
if you are not in either of these categories, the real comparison should not be Cent OS vs Red HAt, but instead either Red Hat vs SuSE Enterprise vs Ubuntu LTS (with paid support), or Cent OS vs Ubuntu vs SuSE vs Fedora vs Debian. the comparison between Cent OS and Red Hat is in many ways an apples to oranges comparison.
with Cent OS you don't have the paid support of Red Hat, but you also don't get the full community support of other distros (because they can't change much from what is in Red Hat without risking compatibility issues)
personally, I only use Cent OS in the case where I am needing to test things that will go on Red Hat servers. If I buy software that's only supported on Red Hat I feel I need to buy Red Hat to really be supported (and include the cost of Red Hat in the price of the software for planning purposes). If a vendor has their head in the sane badly enough to only support a single linux distro they will probably given you a hard time if you run Cent OS instead of Red Hat and it's not worth risking.
David Lang
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