Red Hat & CERN negotiations summary

Timeline

Current status

Timeline

Last LXCERT meeting 03.10.03: continue to look at Red Hat (Enterprise or Fedora, make it acceptable for small labs)

10.10.03: talked to RH, "academic pricing" and support, stopped looking at Fedora

16.10. RH pulled academic pricing

29.10. HEPiX: invited RH, but no real offers and no real talks

outcome: negotiate with RH, find HEP-acceptable solutions, small labs give “mandate” to larger ones.

Nov: original CERN deadline

Nov+Dec+Jan: various attempts to get through to RH ("Make us an offer along these lines").

Major sticking point: price, support/distribution not discussed

SLAC concentrates on DOE deal (without taking CERN into account)

Fermi builds recompiled LTS3

end of January: extended CERN deadline, no real offer yet from RH.

10.02.04: IT decision to go to recompiled version, based on costs (manpower vs. then RH offer).

Announced to be freely available,

some outside institutes are happy, other rather want RHE

Friday 13.02. pressure from SLAC brings price down, but no support yet

Frig 20.02. first idea of support and TAM announced from RH

Frig 27.02. phone conference with good results: price break, support for RH binaries, TAM, redistributable but only with access control.

27.02: Fermi announces HEPL (de-FERMIzed version of LTS3), ask for collaboration

Status:

CERN will buy RHE-3-WS for ~200 nodes with support and TAM,

Will (continue to) buy RHE-ES for servers like ORACLE (cheap -> Alan).

CERN main distribution will be CEL3 (but some binaries may come from FERMI), freely available

SLAC will run RHE (modified and supported) for one year, no long-term commitment

FERMI has LTS3 released and would like to collaborate.

Jan Iven

2004-03-09T10:45:23