Did you know – SUSE has been supporting RHEL for years?

I know that sounds odd but it’s true.

Following our partnership announcement with Mirantis last week, I noticed several quotes in the press from Red Hat saying (SUSE and Mirantis providing support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)) ‘would be confusing and potentially dangerous for customers…’.

Well – I’m glad to say that our customers don’t seem to think so.

In line with our vision to provide our customers with an always open enterprise, and responding to demand from many customers that had a mixed environment that included several Linux OS’s, some bright spark put together a premium support subscription SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with Expanded Support back in 2006 that enables customers to receive support, patches and updates for SUSE Linux Enterprise Server, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS from SUSE. This could be complemented with SUSE Manager, which enables the seamless management of mixed Linux environments.

The combination was welcomed by many and our customers and now they include several of the world’s largest banks, the leading manufacturer of commercial jetliners and many, many other enterprises that have simplified their support and made big reductions in costs.

Delta Lloyd is one of those customers. DLL has a large number of Red Hat Enterprise Linux servers both physical and virtual running its SAP ERP system, various large Oracle databases and several policy management systems. It was previously managing these servers using Red Hat Network Satellite software.

Switching to SUSE Manager and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server with Expanded Support enabled DLL to discontinue its subscription for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL), DLL can continue to use the software itself so the only noticeable change is to the source of support. (You can read the success study for yourself).

And here’s a couple more for good measure:

Tyro Payments (Financial Services, Australia)

RackSpace (Cloud Computing Services, USA)

So don’t listen to the FUD – it’s not that confusing and certainly isn’t dangerous 🙂