Oracle, with its recent claims to be able to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux under the name Unbreakable Linux better than Red Hat does, has a hard road ahead of it. Behind Red Hat’s support network is a large, well-trained organization.
Iain Gray, Red Hat’s senior director of global support, explained that Red Hat offers 24×7 support around the world using a “follow the sun model.” By this, he means that Red Hat maintains technical support centers around the world.
The company’s primary technical support centers are in Raleigh, N.C., Brisbane, Australia, Guildford, England, and Pune, India.
In each of these main centers, support up to and including level 3 is supplied. All together, Red Hat has support centers in 12 countries with help available in 11 different languages.
So, Red Hat’s follow the sun support works like this. If you’re in Japan and you call about an RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) problem, your call is most likely to be answered by a native Japanese speaker either in Japan or in Red Hat’s Brisbane center.
The one thing, according to Gray, that they will all have in common is that every front line support person is a RHCE (Red Hat Certified Engineer).
All together, Red Hat currently employs over 200 RHCEs in support. The support operation itself is actually larger than that, since the 200 doesn’t include the support staff’s support staff or back-line engineers.
Read the full story on Linux-Watch: How Red Hat does support
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