


Monday, October 20, 2008, 09:54 AM
Posted by Administrator
We use a variety of software and services, and I have experience with a variety of companies, so I thought it might be helpful to share my experience and opinions.

* AIX - I've worked off and on with AIX for a couple years now and I've found it to be an extremely stable and reliable platform, but not a terribly easy one to work with. I'd recommend using BSD or Linux or even Windows if you're developing a new project instead, but if you need a stable system and have AIX available, it will do nicely. Support is expensive and you need RISC to use it, but uptimes and hardware are comparable to what you'd expect from big iron.
* CentOS - This is the Linux distribution I'd recommend for most enterprise systems. It has all the goodness of Red Hat's commercial software without the price tag. If you're capable of managing your own Linux systems and need enterprise class software as inexpensively as possible, then CentOS is a good choice.
* RHEL - Red Hat Enterprise Linux is going to cost you, but when you pay for it you get the benefit of updates from a team committed to providing secure and reliable systems. I recommend this for platforms that will be exposed to the Internet (for the sake of security) or for platforms where you expect more than a thousand users in a day.
* Network Box - This is a managed network gateway and security system. Essentially it will filter all your Internet traffic, scanning for viruses and keeping the system
* EMC - I loathe EMC. I've talked to several salespeople who promise everything that you can imagine and when you pay for something, they start having a vary hard time backing up any promises. They kill good companies like VMWare and Legato. Having talked to other IT people, I know I'm representative of the majority of their customers, stuck with them because they sold us something so expensive that we feel obligated to make it somehow work but with a deep loathing for the providers. (I got a new job, so I'm not stuck with them anymore.)
* SEP - I don't particularly care for Symantec as a company and I don't care for their software, but Symantec Endpoint Protection is a decent package for the money with decent network administration controls. SEP is definitively better than previous generations of anti-virus.