[ale] FW: SUSE Linux Days 2013 kicks off this May!

[Beddingfield, Allen]

I was there, too :)
While the prices he put up on the slide may seem a bit high, compared with the prices from VMware and others in the market, it is a bargain.  The one thing he glossed over that will bring the price up more is the unlimited VM entitlement for SLES for each node.  I'm looking at a retail price list now, and for one two socket node, the prices are as follows:
basic support:  $1420 for 3 years
standard support:  $3240 for 3 years
priority support:  $5300 for 3 years.
If you have EDU pricing, you can probably cut all of that in half.
Also, talk with your SUSE rep and see if they can get it in the door at a lower price for you.
Go and download/play with a copy of SUSE cloud.  Given that their easy-to-use repackaging of OpenStack is still a complex beast, I'm not sure I would want to tackle a compile-from-source setup in production.
As a sanity check, just be sure that what you need can't be better served by a traditional solution such as VMware VSPhere, Citrix XenServer or KVM/Xen on Linux + shared storage.  We are a university of over 30,000 students, and we still don't have a cloud deployment (shhh...don't tell the SUSE guys, I've already heard the sales pitch!). We are using VMware VSphere primarily.  Part of that is due to the fact that we don't really want non-IT people haphazardly provisioning new servers :)
Allen B.

--
Allen Beddingfield
Systems Engineer
The University of Alabama
________________________________
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [ale-bounces at ale.org] on behalf of Scott Plante [splante at insightsys.com]
Sent: Tuesday, May 14, 2013 8:22 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] FW: SUSE Linux Days 2013 kicks off this May!

I went to the SUSE Linux Day today and it was very interesting. The major focus was around their suite of cloud technologies and it all looked very nice. Of course, it has a price tag to go with it! I don't have any problem with companies making money on their hard work, but I can say that without major discounts, it's well, well out of my price range. They do deal and it was list the were quoting, so possibly it could still happen. It's all built on open source technologies, including OpenStack. Their very nice tool for creating VMs, install CDs, PXE images, etc., has a free limited hosted version: http://susestudio.com/ . I actually used that a while back (1-2yr?) to create a "VM Appliance" version of one of our products, but no one seemed to be interested then in loading a pre-installed VM. I think our typical users had no idea whether any VM technology was being used in their organization, or who to ask about it, but that's another subject.

A lot was made about how hard OpenStack is to do on your own--has anyone on the list done raw OpenStack? What was your experience like? We tend toward making the free, open source versions of things work for us. Then again, maybe we'd make more money as a company if I didn't spend so much time playing admin and concentrated on my paid programming work ;-).

Thanks, Allen (and Jim Kinney), for the heads up on this seminar. Besides the interesting technical stuff, the lunch was very nice and I got to chat with some very nice and interesting folks :-D

Scott

________________________________
From: "Allen Beddingfield" <allen at ua.edu>
To: ale at ale.org
Sent: Friday, April 19, 2013 3:57:50 PM
Subject: [ale] FW: SUSE Linux Days 2013 kicks off this May!

FYI, this is May 14th in Atlanta.  It is free.  If any of you are interested in learning more about SUSE Linux Enterprise and the related products, it would be a good event to attend.  I plan to be there.  They usually serve a pretty good breakfast and lunch at these things, too :)
Allen B.
--
Allen Beddingfield
Systems Engineer
The University of Alabama