Linux Vendors Comparisons
DeVry University

During my research of Linux vendors, I have narrowed my options to three distinct vendors. I have found Red Hat, Novell, and Ubuntu were three of the best companies worldwide. Each vendor has their advantages and disadvantages. I will address the positive and negative points of each vendor. The main differences between the three vendors that I will discuss are cost, training & support, performance & reliability, and lastly availability. The first thing I will discuss is cost. Cost is always an important issue that must be addressed for a business. A product that does not have an equal or gain return when compared to its cost would be considered a poor …show more content…

Novell is a company known for its high productivity and reliability. According to (Drews, 2005), Novell has some advantages to its use. It supports Red Carpet on NetWare, RPM for NetWare, and most of the NetWare services on Linux. It also has mixed NetWare/Linux node clusters. The bad news is the NSS on Linux is not up to the standards of NetWare and its Linux components lack the luster of other NetWare counterparts. (Open enterprise server, n.d.), says Novell does offer a simple and streamlined network management and is considered very reliable. Novell claims to have the most advanced Linux Platform with high end-user productivity. According to (Henderson & Allen, 2009), Ubuntu does not have a GUI, but gives users the choice of adding services. Some of the services that users can add are DNS, LAMP (Linux Apache MySQL PHP), mail, OpenSSH, PostgreSQL database, print services, SAMBA or TomCat Java Services. Ubuntu includes a version of Eucalyptus. Eucalyptus is an open source tool used with applying Linux on public and private clouds. Ubuntu has the capabilities to be installed as a svelte virtual machine or server applications can be installed manually. (Server management, n.d.), describes the advantages of Ubuntu with real time alerts, professional support, remote access, task management tools, and informative graphs. Each of the vendors offers quick availability to potential customers. They do require that the customer speak to one of their