I'm not sure what you mean by "native" filesystems and what advantage it confers. Afaik NFS is developed independent of all the kernels.

Regarding long-release-cycles: I'd prefer to decide for myself on whether to upgrade or not. Shorter, and more frequent cycles, allow me the freedom to selectively upgrade some server (or some components within the servers). Long release cycles don't give me that kind of freedom.

Regarding payments for such solutions, I think any large organization ends up paying. I'd much rather pay for support and services, rather than the OS itself (since equivalent good-quality distros are available for free). I don't think it's feasible to run a sizeable deployment of Linux distros without paying in some form. You either pay in time (yours or someone else's) or money.

saidi

On Sun, Nov 8, 2009 at 3:24 AM, Alex Nderitu <nderitualex@gmail.com> wrote:
I think NFS is not natively available on the linux kernel, only on BSD
and Solaris which is ofcourse not linux. For the RHEL long release
cycles is actually ok since being a server OS its appropriate not to
keep upgrading and also have longer support period. To pay or not to
for a linux solution is really dependent or organizational policies
such as infosec/audits and ofcourse budget.

On 11/7/09, saidimu apale <saidimu@gmail.com> wrote:
> You don't need to be on Sun's Linux distro/distribution to use ZFS. As a
> rule of thumb, in the Linux/Unix world filesystems are not tied to kernels,
> you can pretty much mix and match kernels and filesystems. There's nothing
> stopping you from using ZFS on any Linux distro. Most come with support for
> a wide variety of filesystems out-of-the-box, you don't need to compile
> anything (or even load any modules).
>
> Core packages in the Linux world are not created by the various distros,
> they all come from the same source (so functionality is pretty much
> identical across all distros).
>
> The differentiating factors are, in my not-entirely-humble opinion:
> - community (size, momentum, helpfulness etc)
> - commercial support (if you need that)
> - stability and frequency-of-release (these pull in opposite directions)
>
> I wouldn't pick RHEL for any reason, it's just added cost with nothing extra
> to gain for it. CentOS commercial offerings and community support pale in
> comparison to Ubuntu with Canonical behind it, plus they're dependent on
> RHEL's release cycles (which are *slow*).
>
> I would go with Ubuntu Server for the reasons above. Plus, you distro
> doesn't get treated like a second-class citizen if it's free (I'm referring
> to the RHEL/Fedora hierarchy).
>
> I especially like Ubuntu Server's cloud offerings (private clouds via
> Eucalyptus. compatible with Amazon's EC2 : http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud). If
> the idea of an elastic data-center that expands/shrink to cope with demand,
> then out-of-the-box support might be a good idea. Like I said before, you
> can also get Eucalyptus (or anything else) from the upstream creator, in
> this case from http://www.eucalyptus.com/
>
> Yes, I know I sound like an Ubuntu fanboy... I just like it (disclaimer: I
> have zero  commercial affiliations with Ubuntu/Canonical).
>
> Bottom-line: do your research well before you decide, you'll be stuck with
> that choice for a long time if your deployment is sizeable.
>
> Saidi
>
> On Sat, Nov 7, 2009 at 2:57 AM, Jacob Odada <jacob.odada@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> FreeBSD or SUN solaris and if you must use an rpm based distro Centos
>>
>> On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 4:04 PM, Tony Likhanga <tlikhanga@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> For production use, there must be a reason why the OpenSolaris guys had
>>> to
>>> pick a collision path with RHEL. See attached.
>>>
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