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along with upgrade activities from time to
time to stay in sync with the fast-moving
upstream code base.
That fast churn leads to substantial testing
and validation costs for existing applications
along with verification of backward
compatibility. Those opex costs can quickly
meet and in most cases, exceed the costs
associated with a commercial distribution
based on that same community project.
This IDC Study takes a look at such a
comparison of several Red Hat products
including Red Hat Enterprise Linux
(including Red Hat Satellite and Red Hat
Insights); Red Hat OpenStack, Red Hat
OpenShift, and Red Hat Ansible, with
community-based alternatives.
The cost of deploying, managing and life-
cycling these products, both individually and
collectively, was considered in comparison to
community-based alternatives. In addition,
the impact of user productivity – the impact
of time to deploy, cost of outages and
related metrics – was considered for these
two sets of technologies.
To develop this comparative
analysis, IDC interviewed organisations
that have deployed subscription-based
Red Hat solutions instead of using
alternative unpaid community-
supported software.
The experiences of these study
participants demonstrate that the value
of subscribing to and using commercially-
supported Red Hat software substantially
outweighs the subscription costs, especially
as organisations deploy and use more Red
Hat solutions collectively. n
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