Why go Enterprise?
 

I have been a linux user for a number of years now, and have grown fond of a few linux distributions, but I use slackware religiously.

That being said, I am setting up a handful of linux servers which will be utilized mainly as web and mysql servers for a consulting company that provides hosting for a number of companies. There have been a number of questions from my coworkers about the possibilty of using an 'enterprise level linux.' Personally, I have not been able to answer questions about pros and cons of an enterprise linux, so I pose the question here.

Is an enterprise linux distribution's main feature the fact that there exists some sort of third party support? What exactly defines an enterprise level distribution, and why would the company I work for be better (or worse) off with one?

Regretably, I haven't been able to find reasonable answers to these questions online.

I appreciate your comments and opinions

In my experience, the only thing that differentiates Enterprise from the rest is the support you get. I think it all depends on the business, how much support they'll need, if any and so on.

My last job, they bought Redhat Enterprise for all of their production servers which was close to about 115 machines. So it was around 80k for the Redhat licenses with support.

Over a two year span, they contacted and used Redhat's support twice, once we emailed support but found the answer ourselves after about 15 minutes of googling.

Right before I left, they had dropped their license and support with Redhat from 115 servers to around 15, just an incase backup for the more critical servers we had on hand running Redhat. All the other machines we planned to migrate to CentOS since we didn't feel the need to pay 80k for supported OS we never used. It's true you get your package updates as well but the place I worked, we built our own RPM packages on the things we needed without waiting on Redhat to do simple compiles any or most administrators can handle.

If it were my choice, I would have migrated the company to Slackware.. ;)

Thanks for the information, thats great knowledge to have.

Now, if I were to suggest a distribution between slackware and CentOS, would you mind giving me a list of the pros and cons? (Or perhaps a link so that I wouldn't waste your time typing) From what I can tell, the automatic updates are the main advantage, is this an accurate perception?

Thanks again for yor time

Package support is also a major thing, with Slackware I doubt much QA is done on the packages. But with RedHat (or even Debian) the package quality is extremely high and you can be relatively sure that installing an update won't break anthing you have setup already.