Oracle Linux Explored

M-Saunders writes "Two days ago Slashdot reported on Oracle's move into the enterprise Linux market, and how it may challenge Red Hat. Red Hat's stock has already dropped, and there's a great deal of talk about the implications of this act. Linux Format got hold of the 'Unbreakable' distro to find out what's going on under the hood. Is it a breakthrough for Linux in the corporate market, or just another RHEL respin? See the article for all the info and screenshots — including an 'interesting' choice of GRUB colours."

Comments

Re:Installing Oracle on linux

[kripkenstein]

I would be more than satisfied if they come with an easy solution for installing Oracle flawlessly on most linux flavors!

That would be nice, but how about if instead of a full-fledged distro, they put out a barebones Linux+Oracle, all set up and configured, that is then run in a virtual machine. Sort of an "Oracle Appliance". Saves the hassles of supporting various distros, and even saves the hassle of supporting an entire single distro (since people will install other things than Oracle on their "Unbreakable Linux"es).

I haven't used Oracle products in several years. Anyone know why they aren't doing this (or are they, and I am just ignorant)?

This will help others adopt Linux

[ciurana]

Greetings.

There is a wrong perception that large companies don't adopt Linux because they prefer commercial offerings. This is only half right. It's not that they like commercial software per se, or that they don't know or understand the benefits of open-source software. The real issue for the lack of adoption is the perceived legal exposures of running software and becoming liable for it (SCO, anyone?). These large companies would be happy to bring Linux in-house as long as a larger company offers some kind of indemnification clause in their contracts.

Many large companies offer Linux distributions and absorb the indemnification. It's no wonder then that superior distributions like Ubuntu aren't on the enterprise shopping list: there is little or no viable indemnification offered. Red Hat is a big fish among open-source vendors but not large enough to convince many large enterprises to take the plunge. That's why IBM has made a good play in this arena: their Linux offerings are rather crappy, but they offer the magic word: INDEMNIFICATION. This has opened many doors for them that remained shut to other vendors.

An Oracle offering brings the same "large company support" that will let the pussies in legal departments and the dumbass middle managers sleep well at night. Oracle is already known to work well with Linux; couple that that with Red Hat functionality and Oracle support (especially if other Oracle products are involved) and that makes a very attractive proposition for all the parties involved. If Oracle plays this right they can start by offering Red Hat dressed in Oracle garb as they came out of the gate, and then provide a migration path toward Ubuntu or another Linux distribution with better tools.

Oracle didn't get that big by being idiots. They are smart and they are aggressive. I think that this is overall a good thing. It creates more competition for IBM, who perhaps now will actually push for real Linux offerings that work, for Novell with SuSe, for Sun and Solaris, and it opens the door for upstarts like Canonical who are well-positioned to make Ubuntu a household name. Last, it will open doors to Linux that would otherwise remain shut. Oracle Linux marks the maturity phase of the first round of consolidation and is the harbinger of the next distribution wars. The next five years will be very interesting.

Cheers,

Eugene Ciurana

Re:Its the support costs that are interesting

[anandsr]

The Price of 1999$ is for Premier unlimited support for 1 year. The Lifetime warranty is for 5 years and beyond. Basically if you buy support for 5 years, then they will support you indefinitely except a doing certification with a third party. I believe that it is fail safe, as in Oracle will probably not be the leader in DB after 5 years anyway. And I wouldn't see anybody committing for 5 years to any software even if it is Oracle.

Oracle may be losing relevance

[mcrbids]

I'm CTO of a small but growing just-barely-post-startup. (EG: We're profitable, and growing fast)

For me, Oracle is a non-starter. It's big, expensive, and reportedly has a high management overhead. So why would I bother?

So far, I've seen massive growth easily and handily supported by PostgreSQL. It's been rock-solid, very stable, secure, and installation consisted of typing two commands:


yum install postgresql-server;
service postgresql start;


We're experimenting with Slony PG clustering, with the intention of rolling that out over Christmas break. (when nobody's looking) Currently, we're snapshotting and mirroring databases hourly, but we want real-time failover...