[CentOS] reasons for using CentOS in business environments

Wed Nov 28 06:25:30 UTC 2007
Christopher Chan <christopher at ias.com.hk>

Rogelio wrote:
> My apologies if this question has been previously answered, but could
> anyone here provide me with resources that I might use to help build a
> case for exclusively using CentOS in an enterprise environment?
> (Approximately 200 servers)
> 
> Long story short, I've used a little of everything out there
> (Gentoo/Debian/*BSD/Slackware) and have a fairly good overall strategy
> of how they all work (all of them have lived on my laptop at one time
> or another over the last 10 years or so), but I'm now looking for
> solid business reasons that I can present to the CxO types of a
> company to show them that CentOS is probably where they'd like to
> look.
> 
> Reasons thus far I've come up with include:
> 
> --free *and* "fully" (at least, in my experience) compatible with RHEL
> --fairly stable (I don't have problems unless I start mixing repos)
> --yum packages (almost as cool as Debian! Ok, I'm biased...or maybe I
> don't know how to properly use yum?)

(nah. yum needs some more catching up. in any case, a working software 
management system.)

If this is a Linux shop, the answer would be what everybody is most 
comfortable with. That fact that you can now make your own 
repository/repositories has made the score more even against Debian, deb 
and apt. Any distro without tools for managing packages on multiple 
servers from a local repository should be dropped. You can therefore 
paint Centos in this light as one that meets such needs.