We selected RHEL because it is a supported platform from our ISVs, because of the Enterprise-level support, and because of the long history of Open Source involved and community contributions.
It is well suited in a work environment, being that an organization can set up their system to be specifically work related and only certain users can get access is really helpful. I also like that multiple users can log in on the same device and keep each account seperate without interfering with the other.
I guess to give it more context, my first job in the Linux ecosystem was in web hosting. And that was basically a Cintas shop and it was all run extremely lean and very bootstrappy do it on your own. You don't get any support. And for that environment, it was kind of just the way it is. It's very cutthroat. You have to move super fast. Once I moved over to the corporate side, every company I've worked with has been on rail. And the thing that really kind of makes it the best choice compared to using another operating system, another flavor of Linux and just kind of figuring out your own is the amount of support that Red Hat gives rail as far as extra tools like Satellite Insights and what's coming up now with Ansible and especially Ansible. Lightspeed, but also SLAs and stuff like that. Because yeah, I mean it was good learning in that first environment because there were no tickets, there was no support. It was figured out. But nowadays it's just nice to have an SLA agreement. I can just open a ticket. I say that that's something that does really well, but I also want to see it expanded, just more like vendor support at an enterprise level. I'm not sure yet what that would mean. I just have that every time we come up for renewal, I look at the price tag and it's like, what else can we do here? I like what Red Hat is doing just more.
For us, it's going to be the deployment and the patching. It does a good job because you can put your no reboot tags and things like that because working with production systems and so we don't want them just rebooting suddenly because they were patched in the Linux world. So the non-reboot tags and the operating system deployment is the biggest thing we find that saves time and that's the biggest thing that we like. The tools. The tools that save time.
From an automation perspective. RHEL is really moving forward, but some of their ideas are still not ideas, but their implementations of it still feel half-baked, like the functionality's there, but it's not the kind of functionality that to me makes it a full-on solution with OpenShift in particular as we're bringing this in and we're getting more into containers because it's more important for the banking industry and other industries. Justice General, well you can do this by script and we don't have an interface for this and sort of things sort of like that. I'm trying to think if there's anything else that RHEL does that bothers me as a general rule.
RHEL has most of the features that are required by an ERP solution. If you need any additional packages, RHEL has a great repository and a very easy package installation/upgrade process.
Red Hat support has really come a long way in the last 10 years, The general support is great, and the specialized product support teams are extremely knowledgeable about their specific products. Response time is good and you never need to escalate.
The biggest thing about RHEL that makes it stand out for enterprise users is the support that we get from the vendor. Whereas with the other ones, you're basically left on your own. There's no official repo, there's no satellite for patching. You're very left on your own with the community.
Auditors are happy that we use an enterprise class distribution
Patch process is easy and fairly predictable
Information Security is fully satisfied with the speed of the fixing the errata and general state of the security patches, including the backporting process
