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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."
To quote the web article:
Unusually, Oracle are claiming that they will support your operating system indefinitely as part of the Premier Support package which works out at $1199 and $1999.
These lifetime models get pretty interesting - you don't know if they are financially viable until a few years have gone by.
But I've seen a few health clubs, airlines and government pension plans so on, suffer on the weight of their liabilities such as lifetime memberships, lifetime frequent flyer points, a unfunded retirement pensions.
That is actually a big risk over a 10 year period..
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
I would be more than satisfied if they come with an easy solution for installing Oracle flawlessly on most linux flavors!
--
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http://www.thecodingstudio.com/opensource/linux/?q =node/20
From the article: "A recent CIO Insight Research Study ranked Red Hat No. 1 for "vendor value". Oracle ranked 39 out of 41 overall, 40th in the category "meets expectations for lowering costs.""
Too expensive? I know why. Larry buys too big boats, too often. And, above all, he never invited me... (Now is your chance, Larry!)
1. Copy someone else's flagship software exactly
2. Remove all vendor identity
3. Explain how your's is somehow "better"
4. Profit and repeat
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
Oracle just announced a security patch to fix the "DB2 optimization malware" on Unbreakable.
I understand Oracle is an industry juggernaut, but $160,000 for a 4-CPU license (from the Guardian article)? Is Oracle really that superior to Ingres, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, and especially PostgreSQL or MySQL?
I'm not trying to troll here. I'm just thinking that for the cost of several Oracle installations and experienced Oracle DBAs you could get a much cheaper (or outright free) database and some really top notch talent.
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
http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
But my organization is not allowed to just go to any schmoe who says they support generically Enterprise Linux. There's a reason we get the contracts that we do with customers, and one of the main ones is because we use a WIDELY supported OS (Red Hat EL) that is common criteria certified to a certain level. Likewise, Red Hat has had it's certification program for professionals out for several years now, and we have several people on staff who are certified and know backwards and forwards how to install and support Red Hat as well as Oracle products.
Likewise, the licensing scheme is pretty interesting. That is NOT the price per server. That is the price per CPU...how they determine the actual CPU will probably be something stupid like their database products, where a quad-Core CPU they count as 2.5 or some nonsense.
Also, not sure how many people have called Oracle lately, but when I call for support, I don't want to be transferred to some faker in India who I can't understand, who says their name is Joe. Dell was guilty of that early on, and we saw how well that worked. Now, their Gold and Silver support for the USA is all back to 100% English speaking people usually in the CST time zone. This is the mistake Red Hat never made...when you buy premier support from them, you get access to an RHCE or higher support person in the USA who you can actually understand, who generally isn't guessing on what your problem might be.
If Oracle wants to compete with Red Hat globally (markets OUTSIDE the USA), I can see that. But I think any USA residents would be fools to go with Oracle instead of Red Hat.
Like anything Oracle tries to do after the fact and supposedly *better* than others (Oracle Collaboration Suite?), I think this idea to compete directly against Red Hat is a stupid one. When I have Oracle issues, I don't even call Oracle anymore...I call a 3rd party consultant or an engineer at Red Hat...99% of the time I usually get better/quicker results.
Since Red Hat bought Cygnus a couple of years back, Linux is no longer everything they do, there's also the gcc business. As far as I know, the gcc business earns money from embedded toolsets, and contracts with microprosessor manufacturers (including big ones like Intel) to improve gcc on their kit, or to port gcc to new CPUs.
So, can anyone in the know comment on how much of Red Hat's business is Linux, as compared to what used to be Cygnus?
Yesterday I suggested Oracle entering the game would be good for the market by increasing competion among Linux vendors. Looking at this offering, I have to say: what a joke. I was completely wrong.
Oracle are pulling nothing more than a publicity stunt with this. I expect I would be correct in the speculation that some marketing executive asked some developers to slap together an “Oracle branded distribution”. They then took a release of Fedora Core and changed graphics and colors. Boom! Instant industry player.
Why bother.
'Our biggest competitors are our customers' - paraphrase of a shareholder statement for a high tech company.
Companies don't NEED Red Hat support. All the documentation they need is freely available. They could provide all their own Linux support. The reason companies buy support from Red Hat is because it is cheaper and more reliable than doing it in-house.
Companies do need to buy support from Oracle because it is closed source. On the other hand, the open source databases are getting better. Oracle has two challenges: it has to provide better support than Red Hat (Oracle has a lousy rep.) and it has to fight off the steadily improving open source databases. In the long term, things don't look that good for Oracle. In the short term, we will see if they can use their superior size to crush Red Hat.
Back in 02-03 I worked for a small startup. We were running Oracle on Linux doing dev work. We called them up to inquire about licenses. I think we were quoted $32k for our setup. We naturally told them, nevermind, we'll port it to MySQL and they eventually came back and offered us a deal at $4k. Of course, our app was meant to be installed at several high profile insurance companies so that meant more Oracle Licenses for them in the future.
BTW, all those numbers are from my rather fragile memory. YMMV.
-- Jason
They don't certify it on $RANDOM_DISTRO because it's a proprietary, closed-source product, and there's simply no way to ensure that it will work with every possible configuration when there are so many variables over which they don't have control; paths, library versions &c.
Back in the day, even proprietary software used to be semi-open source. You actually got the source to compile (almost no two computers were similar enough to be binary-compatible, which was why C was invented in the first place) and tweak if necessary; you just weren't allowed to distribute copies.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
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...
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
I don't think Oracle linux isn't enterprise class, I just think linux suffers a stigma of gross amateurism.
I'm Unix administrator in Fortune 200 company so I guess I should know what Enterprise class is. Did you happen to see the list of other partners who joined the Unbreakable Linux program? Have a look. Hmm.. let's see. HP, IBM, EMC, BMC..etc.
Linux with EMC Symmetrix high end fibre channel storage support, Linux with HP Service Guard mission critical high availability cluster management software, Linux with BMC enterprise class system monitoring tools... Hmm, well, I'd say that's pretty Enterprise class - in fact, that's as much of Enterprise class as you can possibly get today. All these solutions I mentioned have been implemented in Linux today - they are right here, right now. We're not talking about future.
It's not that they like commercial software per se, or that they don't know or understand the benefits of open-source software.
Actually, there ARE sonme segments of the market that is still enamoured with all things Microsoft. Yes, when compared to many alternatives Microsoft is garbage but that doesn't matter. Microsoft solutions are typically like McDonalds food...fast and easy, and when you are hungry and don't have much extra cash it tastes good. Also like McDonalds food, if you only have Microsoft your enterprise will get stomach aches, get fat and bloated and have health problems.
So what markets are hooked on Microsoft? Small and medium enterprises mostly, and operations heavy with automation (factories, refineries and so on--except for REAL mission critical stuff like aerospace, nuclear power generation etc). In other words, the "lower-to-middle class" of the enterprise space. Kind of like how low-to-middle-class America is hooked on fast food. And guess what? Not only are these enterprises hooked on "MS Junk food", they are also poorly informed on the benefits of "proper nutrition" (alternative solutions such as Free software, etc).
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.
That is not what makes large companies happy. The straight license agreement for Microsoft products offers NO indemnification WHATSOEVER. It doesn't even offer a proper warranty! The best you could ever hope for is replecement of defective media. To get indemnification requires a special contract with the vendor regardless of the nature of the software. The "fast food addicts" (which are the largest segment of business customers) don't have the money or legal resources to obtain such indemnification, except for perhaps a small handful of very critical systems. Thankfully, SMEs are rarely on the radar of "litigious bastards" like SCO.
As for REAL large companies that DO have the money and desire for indemnification, what makes them happy is that their vendor is big and established and rich too. Birds of a feather. In any case, this is ALREADY the most successful market for Linux and the one that presents the most challenges for MS. IBM, Sun, Red Hat, Oracle, Novell all are "big company" linux/Unix vendors and can all offer indemnification like MS so it is not the issue. What the issue is is simply that MS products are inferior. They are the biggest consumers of resources, least scalable, largest target of malicious attacks.
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.
Indemnification is not the reason behind Ubuntu's lack of presence in large enterprises. The reason is that Ubuntu didin't come into being as an "enterprise-class OS". It was designed and targeted for personal/workstation use. Yes, it COULD be a capable enterprise OS, with packages installed to support big server installs but in that arena Ubunto is still very unproven. Also, Canonical isn't a big, established player corporately, popularity of its OS notwithstanding, so it isn't the ability to provide "big company support" but rather that it is a "smaller unproven vendor".
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.
I'm all up for more competition, and it is possible for a "re-spun Red Hat" OS to emerge as an independent contender in its own right (that is what happened to M
I agree with the assertations about Oracle Application Server - part of my job is administering it, and it's a shocking piece of junk at times. I really think that's why they wanted Jboss, they can see how much better the code is than their own offering :)
Oracle database is great, but it will be surpassed in the future by open source databases like Postgres and MySQL (both of which are also excellent databases.) The reason it costs so much, is because it makes people feel good that it costs so much - indeedd costs so much, because if it cost less, less people would buy it. Bizarre logic, but it's the way some people think! (especially IT managers in big organisations).
Very few people who make the purchasing decisions actually have any technical knowledge of the product they are buying. Oracle will do well out of this move since it allows old fashioned IT managers to buy into Linux without really buying into Linux. They can stay in that comfortable place where they sleep well at night. They say no one ever got fired for buying IBM. No one ever got fired for buying Oracle either, regardless of how much it costs, or how well it works. Despite Red Hat being a well known company, they're still a little too 'edgy' for some sections of the IT community. It doesn't matter that it's the same code...it has the Oracle logo on it now :)