Heavy-Duty System Administration Utilities? 44
leandrod asks: "I am in the process of helping a small software company define the infrastructure for their major client's new system. It is a big country, and it is a medium-sized client planning on going big. We are planning to standardize on Debian GNU/Linux. I am aware I can have IBM Tivoli Maestro for GNU/Linux for production scheduling, and BEA's Tuxedo TP monitor, but they are unsupported under Debian. I am also aware of one or two free TP monitors, but they are either incipient or stagnating. I couldn't find a production scheduler. I know I can do lots with the standard tools, but keep in mind I am targeting a transaction-processing bureau for a big operation with hundreds of thousands of terminals and millions of users, something like a poor man's Wal-Mart, or even Visa. Are there vendors out there willing to support Debian or just GNU/Linux in general? If not, are there free software projects that accomplish the same thing?"
Support (Score:2, Interesting)
Think long-term stability... (Score:5, Insightful)
Go with Red Hat or Suse. You might find that going with a more stable (from a support POV) Unix OS like Solaris may be a good choice for certain systems as well. The support costs are real, but a Tivoli Management environment would cost a helluva lot more if the IBM salesfolk talk your client into it.
If you in a signifigant transaction processing business, the money will come - spend the money now to start a Maestro or Tuxedo system so you don't need to waste valuable time (and lose business) later.
I also hate to say this a longtime Debian fan... but the major commercial distros aren't going anywhere. RedHat and Suse have built brands and have major money & support flowing in from corps like IBM & HP. Can the same be said for Debian, whose stable release is starting to get a little crusty?
Remember to ask yourself what you & your client needs and what is best for the business. Keep the tech-geek religious wars on Slashdot!
Re:Think long-term stability... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Think long-term stability... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Think long-term stability... (Score:2, Interesting)
Debian packages are too old, unless you want to jump into the "unstable" tree - and what business can accept unstable server software? Back-porting bugfixes just don't cut it in the business world. Debian lacks a powerful entity that governs development priorities - but it doesn't lack zealots who will die for their cause.
For example... Debian hasn't got XFree86 4.3.0 in their stable tree (and they wont for years to come as they still have 4.1.0 stable) - whereas RedHat has had a stable XFree86 4.3
Re:Think long-term stability... (Score:5, Funny)
Debian packages are too old, unless you want to jump into the "unstable" tree - and what business can accept unstable server software?... For example... Debian hasn't got XFree86 4.3.0 in their stable tree (and they wont for years to come as they still have 4.1.0 stable)
Right. Everyone knows that you absolutely cannot run a large-scale production server effectively without the new features in XFree86 4.3. It's obvious that 4.1 just doesn't cut it when you have millions of transactions to process... I mean, it can't even change the screen resolution on the fly!
Re:Think long-term stability... (Score:4, Informative)
ctrl+shift+(numpad Plus/minus)
Re:Think long-term stability... (Score:2)
ctrl+shift+(numpad Plus/minus)
Right. To be precise, it can't change the desktop size on the fly.
Re:Think long-term stability... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Think long-term stability... (Score:2, Interesting)
He's hardly missing the point, you are.
New-featured software is NOT what a production business server needs. Such servers need stable, well-tested software that is patched for security and serious functional problems - but NOT constantly enhanced with new features that contain their own set of new bugs. The idea of business server software is to gradually approach a bugfree state - and you don't get that by constantly addin
Re:Think long-term stability... (Score:4, Informative)
X is a *bad* example, easily attacked, but your argument is fundamentally wrong. The goal with production servers is stability and security, and the Debian stable approach is the hands-down best way to achieve that (though simply running stable isn't enough, it's a good start).
The only valid reason to upgrade production software is if you must have the features available in the new version, or if you can no longer get support for the old version. Outside of that, you keep what works. Debian stable is very well-supported and it's never more than two or three years behind the cutting edge. It's really ideal, with the caveat mentioned up a few posts that if you need to run closed source commercial software, you will get much better support on Red Hat and SuSE.
Re:Think long-term stability... (Score:2)
There is a lot of popular support for Debian. Also, there are people out there who apprciate the crustiness as a tradeoff for the higher chance of it working well. Further, Debian has one of the more flexible installation programs out there (/cdrom and
Re:Think long-term stability... (Score:2)
Could you:
o Add
o Mount another (server's)
Re:Think long-term stability... (Score:2)
What about MySQL [mysql.com], or do you not consider them to be "comercial" because their support offerings are optional and you can use their product for free if you choose to? MySQL offers comercial support to any and all who use their product, regardless of the platform you've installed it on (even Windows!), but of course you'll have to ge
Re:Think long-term stability... (Score:2)
Or remote replication?
Or security and access roles compatible with HIPPA regulations?
Or reliable data recovery compatible with large-scale backup systems like Legato or TSM or Veritas?
MySQL cannot do these things. A RDBMS like DB2 or Oracle can deliver an incredible amount of value for certain applications, particularly things like high-volume transaction processing.
You need to use the right tool for the right job. MySQL is the right choice for alot of database application
Re:Think long-term stability... (Score:3, Informative)
How about database clustering?
I'm not sure about that one - but it seems like either regular replication or 2-way replication oughtta get those needs taken care of. Or, read This article [mysql.com]
Or remote replication?
Replication in MySQL [mysql.com] is easy - I'm running a couple of replicas right now for backup purposes
Or security and access roles compatible with HIPPA regulations?
MySQL's access control can grant and deny access down to the column level.
Re:Think long-term stability... (Score:2)
Re:Think long-term stability... (Score:2)
Sun's N1 (Score:3, Informative)
I hear Sun offering suport for Linux as well, these days
Re:Sun's N1 (Score:3, Informative)
In fact, N1 does not support normal Solaris boxes right now.
It only supports Sun's blades. All of these other things will be supported in the bright, shining future, of course.
WTF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Why debian? Don't get me wrong -- debian is great for a lot of things, but
Focus on the tools you need _first_ and the OS they run on second. Getting a great OS with no tools is a lousy place to be, especially after a few months when the client has refused to pay some bills because things aren't working and you have to explain at a meeting between their CEO/CFO/VP of whatever and your CEO/VP/whatever exactly why not, and that to fix it they need to invest $X more in some other platform along with $Y to migrate.
Part 2: Some ideas
The TP monitor (e.g. CICS) is frequently done now in a database, so use begin trans, commit trans or rollback trans, and you've got transactions. At least until your database or number of users gets too big. Postgres is a good open-source database that has commercial support options and supports transactions. There are several others, sapdb I think is one. Not sure if mysql supports transactions or not. This is an area where a commercial app (DB2, Sybase, Oracle) may be a worthwile investment, especially if you get into clustering or HA hardware setups.
Many people use the J2EE framework. In open source that pretty much means jboss. Runs great on linux and you get to deploy lots of apache servers and use buzzwords like 'entity bean' and 'xml'.
What in the h*ll do you need to do schedule-wise that can't be done in anacron and some simple shell-scripting? There is a reason there aren't really any open source schedulers: cron and anacron are ubiquitous and do what they do extrememly well.
Re:WTF? (Score:2)
Yes, but, everyone, please go get some real training before going all-out on J2EE. J2EE is really great, but the developers need some perspective of its complexity before it can be used effectively.
Re:WTF? (Score:2, Informative)
MySQL supports transactions!! (Score:2)
I know someone else already set this straight in this thread but I suppose you can't stress this simple and important fact more than enough! Moderate this as redundant, I can afford to loose some Karma over a database that has constantly kept bread on my table this and the entire last year. Why looks like next month I'm going to get another project migrating from Informix to MySQL :-)
Sad reality is multiplatformic (Score:3, Insightful)
Now as for small companies that cannot afford a multitude of servers, I'd offer a single solution that best fulfills most of their needs and that I would like to keep up and polished for them myself... A debian.
UserLinux - "Debian Enterprise" (Score:5, Informative)
Possible Solution (Score:2, Informative)
Note: I'm not fully unbiased. I have a friend that works there.
TP monitoring? (Score:3, Funny)
Why Not Redhat Linux Enterprise? (Score:2, Insightful)
Since Debian is not supported and Redhat Linux probably is, why have you decided to standardize on Debian? It beats me!
Regards,
Seun Osewa
Re:Why Not Redhat Linux Enterprise? (Score:1)
Linux is Linux, and if some company fucks their distro up so much that a vendor hast to bend over backwards to support it, that distro should NOT be supported.
There is NO reason why what works on one distro wouldn't work on another. No LEGITIMATE reason.
Re:don't forget (Score:2)
My .02 (Score:5, Interesting)
Using debian for commercial stuff isn't as easy as it should be. Many companies don't support debian and seemingly have no desire to. One of those is Oracle. Oracle can be installed on Debian, and there are tons of docs out there to do it. In the end, if you really want debian, stick to your guns until you run out of bullets.
Another option, tell these companies you're gonna buy X dollars of thier stuff, but only if they make it run on debian on your hardware. If you're willing to spend a few million on Oracle, I'm sure oracle will make it work. The same goes for IBM. I know IBM does tons of software sales, and says they support RH/Suse, but theres no reason they can't make it run on debian.
I really dont understand why companies dont support debian(please no RPM vs. DEB), in spite of the long release cycles. IMO, it makes it the perfect candidate. Once something is released as stable, it will generally stay that release for at least a year, sometimes two. Oracle could begin to certify Debian/sarge now, and when its released they would have a deployment platform for quite a while. Hell
Re:My .02 CDN (Score:2)
Re:My .02 (Score:2)
scheduling tools (Score:5, Informative)
Add in : multiple platforms, vendors in different countries with different time zones, holidays, cultures and calendars, (try matching our Julian or Gregorian calendar to a Lunar calendar), with varying schedules, such as cyclical/hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, annual. Matching them to accounting needs like a fiscal year that does not match the calendar year, production schedules that cross week and month boundaries, and online systems that are up or down different days of the week and things can get very crazy very fast.
I can point you to 2 companies that seem to offer the most complete solutions for multiple platform shops, other than IBM's Tivoli, which works fairly well from what I have heard:
First:
Cybermation in Canada makes a product called ESP:
http://www.cybermation.com/solutions/jobsch
They have a cute little site at:
http://www.replaceyourjobscheduler.com/sitel
I was at a very large company when they swapped over from the CA7 tool to this one on their MVS systems. I was impressed with the product and the company's support. That was 8 years ago or so, so I cannot vouch for the product or the company now, but I have heard only good things about them currently.
Second:
BMC markets a product called Control-M, with all kinds of modules including an Enterprise Manager: http://www.bmc.com/products/productlist/0,2831,19
I currently use this product in an MVS/Unix/WinNT/Oracle/SAP environment. It does work. It has it's issues and shortfalls, and we have some problems with support, but we have managed to complete our schedule across all platforms every day, with only a very few exceptions in the past 3 years I have worked with it. We run in excess of 10,000 batch/background processes per day across many platforms.
In all 3 cases, Tivoli, Cybermation, BMC, licensing can be a bit pricey. But if you research the products closely, and only license what you really need as opposed to what you think you need, you can get by.
I also strongly suggest you hire an experienced scheduler to help out. This is a very undervalued and complcated specialty. Like programming, many can muddle through but few are truely good at it.
Tom
Talk to IBM sales (Score:3, Insightful)
Plenty of us inside IBM would like to see some free Linux distributions supported, but the company makes its decisions based on commercial pressures, not ideology, and right now not enough people want to run their enterprise on Debian, Gentoo or any other free (beer) Linux.
We use IBM & Debian (Score:4, Informative)