CentOS is not your everyday Linux. It's a server distribution, meant to be used in production environment where users do not care about what applications they have installed. It's a distro that you will most likely run without any GUI, reboot once every other year or so, if that, and upgrade only when you really must, since the inclusion of even simplest binaries could be dreadfully risky for your setup.

CentOS is a distribution that deals in long-term stability and security. Branched off as a free version of the vastly popular RedHat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), CentOS is everything the most important server distribution is, except the expensive, official support from the vendor. Speaking of support, CentOS 5.x versions, which are all based on RHEL5.x versions, are going to be supported until 2014, a total of seven years since the major release launch in 2007.

CentOS for serious linux users

In 2007, University of Maiduguri decided to look for an alternative solution to their Existing Mikrotik based Hotspot system to tackle issue of repetitive licensing. We decided to research open source solution where we tested and found Coova-Chilli to be the best and having more features, we were able to come up with a product that was developed in-house in the University. We are now proud to have our Product called "MPot" which is even at Version as of the time of this writing. The Base Operating system had to CentOS because we wanted to have the robustness and scalability of RedHat Enterprise Linux which we got from CentOS Linux. We are glad to have worked with the CentOS community and will like to thankeveryone involved on this wonder Open Source OS.

Information:
University of Maiduguri,
Maiduguri,
Borno State
Nigeria

http://www.unimaid.edu.ng

rackAID uses CentOS. rackAID provides on-demand IT infrastructure management. Many of our clients use our server management services to help them get the most out of their servers. We manage 100's of systems and many are running CentOS.

We also work with R1Soft's CDP backup solution on CentOS to provide a continuous data protection system for our servers. This is great software providing full disk images that can be used for bare-metal recovery.

Our latest CentOS work involved setting up a fault-tolerant system using a Dell AX4-5 SAN and M1000 blade enclosure. We used LVM2, DM MPIO, and iSCSI running on the 64-bit CentOS 5 version to create a fault tolerant storage point for our MySQL servers. We are then hooked another SAN using GFS to provide a data storage for the user content on this busy dating site. We then have a lighttpd box out front directing traffic to a set of application servers running apache, php, and memcached.

Why all of the details? To show that you can use CentOS in the enterprise.

Optocomponents GmbH uses CentOS 5.2 on an IBM X3200 Quadcore (8GB RAM / 750GB Sata RAID1) for fileserving and will soon implement another server (IBM Netfinitiy 6000 Quad-Xeon 700 Mhz, 4GB RAM, 80 GB U160-SCSI RAID 5e) for System Disaster Recovery Backups. Incremental Data-Diff-Backups are done by an external proprietary company which supports CentOS/RHEL... ;)

Sword-Intech a Software house producing bespoke applications for Insurance market have been using CentOS for our monitoring, public DNS, IM Solutions and MySQL database servers for over three years and are extremely satisfied with the results. Our hardware includes HP ProLiant DL360 & DL380, DELL PowerEdge ranging from single core Xeon to dual quad core Xeon systems.

We absolutely recommend CentOS as a robust operating system for any application.

Hello, my name is yonatan pingle,
i am a linux user for about 10 years now, and worked as a Linux root for sevral hosting companies in the past, which used to run RedHat ( in 2001-2002 ) Debian ( in 2003-2004 ) then for a short time, tryed out Fedora project, ( wanted to go back to redhat based system as in the past ), and then i figured that fedora is a good distro for a desktop, not for a production server due to its updates and EOL cycles.

there you get it, started with implementing Centos 4 in a company called Securehost.co.il ( which ran on HP DL140 machine ),

nowdays i started working for a comany called beastserv.com , and the fun part was that no one was a root there before me, so i right away went and installed CENTOS 5.2
i can say for sure , centos is a really powefull platform for LAMP + mail,
i also use centos on my bussiness desktop laptop ( old hp pavilion 3000 ), works perfectly! with KDE 3.5.


Recomended Strongly!

did i say stable?
root@server securehost ~ # uptime
06:42:12 up 226 days, 10:57, 1 user, load average: 0.01, 0.01, 0.00
root@server securehost ~ # date
Sun Mar 29 06:42:20 IDT 2009

it would have been 448 days if we haven't switched a physical location of this machine!

I want to share our experience with centos in building an enterprise cluster for virtualization purpose. We host many services (VLC, Database, Web, Mailing) based on centOS system. Thanks a lot for your work.

XiNet S.r.L.
http://www.xinet.it

We're using CentOS here in our department at the Austin Community College in Austin, Texas. This month, we realize a long term goal of dual-booting every workstation in our department (125+). A moment to pause and reflect on where we've come from...

We use Linux to teach IC Layout & Design with Cadence and Mentor Graphics products. When I picked up the Linux network, about two years ago, there were 13 machines that were dedicated to Linux with static IP addresses. In the last two years, the number of machines that have been converted to dual-booting with Windows has steadily grown, a lab at a time, until now. We've converted to an LDAP directory structure with centralized logins; we're using SAMBA, FTP, SSH, Network installs, cloning systems, pushing email around, DNS, web server, centralized printing, a scripted environment, the whole 'enchilada'.

CentOS has shown to be stable, modular, adaptable, and a dream to work with. I lay awake nights thinking of what horizon to move toward tomorrow. You can check us out at Meetup as well: Austin Linux Meetup

compevo communications - VPS Servers & Web Hosting Services has been successfully using Centos in a variety of ways to achieve mission critical reliability and scalability for our customers.

We've found CentOS to be the perfect blend of features, security and enterprise tested packages in comparison to other Unix/Linux distributions. We've used CentOS in a variety of different clustered configurations with great success.

CentOS is the perfect choice for companies who worry if the packages they're installing on their system have actually been tested.

Our hats go off to the CentOS team for doing a fantastic job and enabling some of the best applications to run seamlessly.

Kusu, the foundation for Red Hat HPC and Platform Open Cluster Stack (OCS), is a standardized approach to easily build, manage and use Linux clusters. Kusu is an open source project sponsored by Platform Computing.



Designed with the user-centric goals in mind:
* Simplified cluster management, operation and deployment.
* Compiled with standardized implementation, providing faster time-to-market, and cost reduction on in-house engineering resources.
* Stability and scalability on development, test and maintain multiple growing clusters and software stacks.
* Pre-configured compatible clusters help to reduce the entry barrier for new users - administrating cluster without significant training.
* Reducing human error and easing hassles by putting various on automation.
* Lower the cost and hassles for maintenance with diagnostic tools to assist with configuring and deploying application.
* Enabling off-the-shelf performance computing application with modular and interchangeable stack.
* Modular and hybrid stack that transparently integrates open source and commercial software into a single consistent cluster operating environment.
* Standards-based, open and vendor-certified

Kusu documentation, download and community:
Kusu community
Kusu documentation
Kusu for CentOS downloads