Is 7 years of RHEL support still sufficient ?

“Let me explain what I mean. When Red Hat released RHEL2.1,
seven years of support was perfect, seemed more than one would
want. RHEL3 came 18 months after RHEL2.1 and after one year of
testing RHEL3 and 3rd party integration new systems could be
deployed, giving you 6 years of support. Your hardware would
usually not outlive the operating system support.

“Big companies and organizations usually have a hardware cycle
of about 4 years, after which the support of the hardware becomes
too expensive to maintain. (Think: spare parts) This means that if
new hardware arrives, you need to make sure that what you load on
these servers will be supported for at least 4 years. If you take
virtualization into scope, this cycle may be virtually
stretched.”

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