The concept of an enterprise linux offering is that you have a fairly long time between releases (12-24 months) and a product that remains supported for an even longer period of time than the release cycle. This allows for stable server deployments with guaranteed bug fixes and security updates for an extend period of time (up to 5 years). Before the enterprise offerings, when the security updates stopped for a product, it was time to upgrade ... and that could be as frequently as every 12 months. Now that same business can expect bug fixes and updates for 5 years, meaning now normal application upgrades can drive the process, and not the need to upgrade your operating system. . . .
Summary: What is Enterprise Linux? Who has it? What does it cost? Are there any viable free alternatives? These are all questions that this article will address and try to answer.

Enterprise linux is being offered by the three major commercial linux distributions; RedHat, SUSE and Mandrake. Here is what each says the purpose of it's enterprise product is.

RedHat says it's enterprise offering (RedHat Enterprise Linux 3, RHEL) is: a reliable, secure, high performance platform designed for today's commercial environments. This product has a long release cycle (12-18 months), and a long support cycle (supported by RedHat for 5 years).

SUSE touts it's enterprise product (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 8, SLES) as: a server-optimized version of the vendor's Linux distribution. It represents a continuation of the company's tradition of producing solid product, with the added value being a level of consistency and portability up and down the enterprise food chain -- it provides the same APIs and basic layout running on anything from a humble commodity server to an IBM mainframe. SUSE also has a 5 year support cycle and a release cycle of 24 months.

Mandrake bills it's enterprise edition (Mandrake Linux Corporate Server 2.1) as: a complete 'all-in-one' enterprise solution that includes everything needed to rapidly deploy world-class Linux server applications in the enterprise.Mandrake has a 12 month release cycle, but I couldn't find a hard time frame for a support cycle.

So basically, the concept of an enterprise linux offering is that you have a fairly long time between releases (12-24 months) and a product that remains supported for an even longer period of time than the release cycle. This allows for stable server deployments with guaranteed bug fixes and security updates for an extend period of time (up to 5 years).

For businesses with custom server applications, like Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or Customer Relationship Management (CRM) databases and associated applications, this can greatly increase stability and greatly reduce costs. Before the enterprise offerings, when the security updates stopped for a product, it was time to upgrade ... and that could be as frequently as every 12 months. Now that same business can expect bug fixes and updates for 5 years, meaning now normal application upgrades can drive the process, and not the need to upgrade your operating system.

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