Red Hat charges for support. Linux is free to use, but big enterprise users like to have tech support. You would think they would just have employees who know what they’re doing.
That's what we do, albeit a small enterprise.
Its more than just technical support.
Its the security patches and updates.
I worked for a big corp, though not in IT. However I had access to the IT team and the servers. Their Linux boxes were Dell hardware running Redhat. My understanding was they did so because they could let Redhat take the heat if anything went terribly wrong.
I still don’t get it. Sounds like a serious “no confidence” vote by management. If they don’t think their IT department is competent, why not hire people who are?
I truly believe the boys at the top weren’t competent to hire good people.
It's not always that simple. Even with RHCSAs on staff, we still have to call Red Hat for support on issues that need to be resolved quickly. Given enough time, any engineer can solve any problem, but when you're talking about losses in the millions of dollars per hour range, time is literally money.
Same goes with Microsoft. While I have 20 years of experience with Microsoft operating environments and have Microsoft certifications, there are some issues I just need resolved quickly and have to rely on Microsoft for that reason.
Large corporations require extensive infrastructure to maintain business, and while supporting a single LAMP RHEL box is one thing, supporting a farm of 50 LAMP servers behind an F5 load balancer with WAN optimizers and other infrastructure considerations adds troubleshooting effort to any resolution timeline.