<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Originally posted by ClueByFour:
My firm (Fortune 500) has support from Sun and HP and IMB and EMC and the like that blow away anything, and I do mean anything, you can get from Red Hat or any other Linux vendor. When you are talking about six or seven figures of loss for an hour of downtime, this changes the equiation somewhat.</font>
Somewhat, but not enough to keep modern thinking CIO's from adopting Linux in production at a very fast rate.
Oracle (can't remember if they're in the Fortune 500 or not
) claims to be 100% Linux. I know for a fact that they use Linux exclusively for their ASP offering which counts financial institutions among its clients. Obviously, they think it's ready for prime time and are betting heavily on it.
In a former life I was responsible for one of the top 5 Sun shops in California. I can assure you that their support was nothing to write home about (and I had direct phone numbers up to the SVP level).
Hardware & software suppliers will only ever contractually commit to a RESPONSE time, not a RESOLUTION time. I don't care if you're talking IBM or Honest Bob's Dog Poop Linux Distribution.
You will find many examples of Fortune 500 companies using Linux in production in the article I listed above. Check Information Week's website as well for more.
For tasks requiring 4 or fewer processors, you can't Linux on price/performance. Many Linux admins boast uptimes > 1 year on their boxes.