[CLUE-Tech] RedHat Kickstart, with Oracle and EMC.

[Jed S. Baer]

For those who aren't on the CLUEjobs list, this is corollary to the job
posted there for a Linux uber-geek -- you know the type of posting, I'm
sure. They want a disparate assemblage of expertise. I actually believe
there are some people with the whole combination, but they'll be pretty
hard to find.

Anyway, I was reminded of the CLUE meeting where I asked the IBM folks
what they knew about connecting commodity boxes running Linux to large
disk arrays such as EMC. The indication was that there wasn't anything in
the market right now for that -- thus, in my mind, presenting a barrier to
the adoption of Linux servers.

Well, wouldn't you know, you can, in fact, hook a linux box up to an EMC:

  https://www.redhat.com/solutions/migration/isv_storage.html

This only follows, for example, from the RedHat/Oracle "enterprise"
platform strategy. I'm surprised that IBM didn't know about this, if only
from a "know your competitors" point of view.

It also answers a question which I've had at the back of my mind for a
while -- that of how business are attaching enough storage to PCIbus
platforms for the sorts of storage requirements that large business
typically have.

Having never worked with Kickstart, I'm also wondering how it reacts to
custom kernels, as this is the mechanism I'm aware of by which you'd get
Veritas VFS and a vendor-supplied driver module (for the fibre-channel
controller) into a custom distro.

jed
-- 
... it is poor civic hygiene to install technologies that could someday
facilitate a police state. -- Bruce Schneier