Red Hat has  announced that it now offers RHEL Extended Life Cycle Support (ELS) on top of normal subscriptions for specific versions and variants. Meaning that for RHEL3 only i686 AS/ES and for RHEL4 i686 and x86_64 AS/ES and ia64 AS are taken into consideration and are thus more expensive than regular support. No pricing information is available yet.

As a result of this the timeline of RHEL releases looks like this:

Click the picture to see it in all its glory

Honestly, the announcement comes too late for a lot of companies that already have planned and executed (sometimes painful) RHEL3 migrations. Extended support could in some of these cases be a more cost-effective solution. On the other hand, with this late announcement Red Hat might have anticipated lowering the number of applicants at the start of the offering. And a sufficient high price tag will influence decision makers even more…

An offering like this also risks that application vendors might hold on to (too) old RHEL releases rather than spending time testing and fixing their software (often agents) on the latest RHEL release. Which is one of the most important reasons why companies delay implementing newer RHEL releases today. Which makes Open Source alternatives more attractive (as they do not suffer from that). Companies that suffer from this delayed availability of proprietary software should complain loudly to vendors and threaten to move (or simply move) to alternatives.

All in all, this new support option clearly strengthens Red Hat’s position in the wider Enterprise OS market and makes their virtualization product (RHEV) offering even more attractive compared to the competition.

Original Post: http://dag.wieers.com/blog/is-10-years-of-rhel-support-still-sufficient