The Cloud and the Ultimate Appliance…what is Your Choice – Linux (Redhat), Linux(Oracle) or Linux(Centos)?
January 13, 2011 
37 Comments
Server Consolidation and The Cloud as well as Appliances go hand by hand,
and most of those solution seem to be using Linux.
If you recall an old Story about the early days in Ford, the Car manufacturing giant, they used
to say "It does not matter which Ford car color you want to choose, as long as the color is black".
Later on they changed their mind and now you have more colors to pick from 
Having said that, there are several major Linux distributions,
but right now, let’s focus on a very prominent one: Redhat Linux.
Theoretically appliance manufacturers who want to build their cloud
applications based on Redhat Linux could choose either
Commercial Redhat Enterprise Linux or Oracle Enterprise Linux
or the Open Source CentOS.
All those distributions share a similar base source, applications and kernel.
CentOS is kind of the test bed where many new features are tested,
some make their way into the Commercial Redhat and Oracle releases and some don't.
Oracle's offering is takes Redhat's release and adds several major components
including kernel and applications as well as patches. Oracle claims that those
additions provide better Oracle database performance and better stability in general.
I believe Oracle also claims to have larger and better support team.
I am not going to get into the argument referring to the best one to use as
a server in your data center.
My question is more about:
If you were to buy an appliance, and you had the option to choose whether it
will be based on either Redhat Enterprise Linux, Oracle Enterprise Linux or CentOS
what would you choose and why.
Here are several key points related to those distros:
1. Redhat and Oracle require a license fee, it could be separate
or embedded in the appliance pricing.
2. The official Redhat and Oracle prices differ
3. Reahat and Oracle will do their best to integrate their release
with their system management and other products, while CentOS
should be focused on the basic Linux functionality.
There are other factors as well and I'd love to hear what see as such.
But in general it looks like choosing CentOS is a very good option…
1. Price is good (free) – and so you as the Appliance's
customer, can pay less for the appliance
2. You get the basic features you need as the basis for the appliance:
less code, less bugs, bigger stability
3. You are not locked to a specific vendor
4. You probably have more people trying out the system
and debugging it, since many will choose the free offering
5. Even if you are heavily invested in Redhat or Oracle's Linux,
since you want the appliance do its job, you don't really care
what base operating system is used for the appliance
So what's you take on this question regarding The Cloud and Server Consolidation ?
Could I just put you right on one thing… CentOS is *not* a testbed. It is exactly the same code as RHEL, but may lag a bit. The RedHat testbed is Fedora.
Hey Steve,
Right on! I fixed this note regarding CentOS.