[CentOS] Issues with CentOS in enterprise

[Les Mikesell]

On Sun, Dec 12, 2010 at 10:45 AM, Zdenek <zdenek.w at o2.pl> wrote:

> Does anybody have experience with pushing CentOS in enterprise?
>
> I have the following situation. I tried to promote CentOS to local bank. They have now a couple of Gentoo-based systems and I tried to explain them that CentOS is much better option for enterprises.
>
> IT department is interested in stability of the system, so they are ready to give CentOS a try. But the problem came from management and information security division.

Do they know about the Gentoo systems?

> That guys look much affected by FUD created by M$. They tell the story like "you can not rely on this open source, it is built by just few community geeks, you never know what will happen if the developer will be hit by bus tomorrow" and so on. They especially refer to the last year FUD story published at ZDNet (http://goo.gl/y0LBi). So, IT guys are allowed to use open source only if they can prove that it has stable community and transparent development and build process they can reproduce on their own if necessary.
>
> I guess, I'm not the first who encounter this issue. Could you share your experience how to deal with it? Are there any public resources that can be used as proofs of CentOS stability?

Start with Red Hat as the source of the stability and long term
support.  And in fact, RH may be more acceptable in this scenario if
they are willing to pay to have support from a big company.
Functionally it shouldn't make any difference since it is the same
code either way.  I don't think there is any 'proof' that Centos will
continue to be stable in the future, but you can look at their
excellent history of getting updates out immediately after the RH
release.   You shouldn't have any problem mixing RH/Centos systems if
you have some systems where the paid support is critical and some that
you can support yourself.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com