Vivek J. Patankar wrote:
A certain corporate has a very large mail setup, several servers hosting thousands of POP mailboxes. The OS used here was RH7.3 or RH9. A decision is taken to cut down the number of servers that mailboxes reside on to two. The hardware selected was powerful intel based hardware from Sun. The OS of choice was Centos 4.0 because it was recommended by the vendor who supported the mail servers. A hardware related hiccup caused the corporate to refer the matter to Sun who promply refused to provide support. The reason cited for the refusal was that the boxes were certified for RHEL and not Centos, so Sun wouldn't be responsible for problems. After being stung by something like this, the business side decided that the servers are to be migrated to Solaris, and any software distributed with an open source license, specifically if the license/documentation states that "THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED AS IS AND WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY" and that the developer is not resposible for any data loss or other problems arising from using the software. To what extent this decision was adhered to, I don't know.
[snip]
Any comments on this case?
Dear Vivek,
Whenever a big company is looking for installation and maintainence of a huge IT system, it is necessary for the bosses to ensure that their _service_provider_ has the necessary expertise to provide hardware and software support as and when necessary. This service provider for corporates will not be a small company but a proper established one that has experience in handling such big projects. It is for the SP to maintain contacts with the software and hardware companies and the LUG community for facing any eventuality. I am sure there are many big game linux service providers who can provide that kind of IT support.
Regards,
Rony.
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