The Real Truth About Oracle's 'New' Kernel

An anonymous reader writes "Yesterday at OpenWorld, Oracle announced a 'new' Enterprise kernel for its so-called Unbreakable Linux. What's the real truth? The company is simply sticking a 2.6.32-based kernel on top of its re-branded Red Hat Enterprise Linux clone and trying to spin it as a new and innovative development."

Comments

Uhh, isn't this what Oracle customers pay for?

[NevarMore]

Oracle is simply offering a newer kernel than Red Hat and fine-tuning it for Oracle's own software.

This could be glossing over quite a bit of useful work for Oracles customers. "Fine tuning" could be anything from tweaking some compiler settings to actually patching things in the kernel. Its hardly a trivial task given the size and complexity that most Oracle customers bring.

Re:Uhh, isn't this what Oracle customers pay for?

[Anonymous Coward]

oh please, oracle customer complexities are a result from the oracle usage and not the motivation for it.

oracle is one of those business providing useless solution so they can charge you twice for the consultancy.

Re:Uhh, isn't this what Oracle customers pay for?

[AnonymousClown]

Ooooo, a placebo solution!?!

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We guarantee that by purchasing from us, a CIO will have continued employment with plenty of bonuses and appear to be innovative!

Proprietary and F/OSS vsersions available.

Ask about our buzzword du jour package! Free with this code: IMA PHB RETARD

So what?

[clang_jangle]

What did you expect, that Oracle will have coded their own kernel from scratch? Every distro uses a version of the same Linux kernel. TFA is a troll.

Re:Ohhh the truth!!!

[bill_mcgonigle]

But then, they already have Solaris which is much more suited for the markets they are aiming at (high-end enterprise servers), so why waste the time ?

Drivers.

Re:1, 2, 3, Profit!

[bill_mcgonigle]

3. ???

3. Support.

Re:Rebranding something is surprising?

[JonJ]

After Nintendo screwed Sony

Yeah, imagine that. Nintendo didn't want to give Sony complete control over something that Nintendo had essentially created. Those bastards.

Innovation != Novelty

[sco08y]

To innovate means to make something new happen. It doesn't have to be radically new, just something that wasn't available before. In the real world, most innovations are pretty humble, but humble doesn't imply not useful.

Do you ever look at Crapware 7.0 and think they just added some 3D arrows for absolutely no reason? Now look at TFA and the reactions here, this is *precisely* why the marketers demand idiotic features.

If you've actually set up Oracle on a system, you quickly realize that a. it's hugely complicated but b. it's a solved problem so c. why am I going through all this pain when Oracle has done this already? Of course, they have, calling it OEL just makes it easy to explain to the boss.

And for anyone trying to maintain an Oracle system, this is a big deal. It is not an understatement that for the typical business, their Oracle database more or less *is* the business. You want something that's going to work, with no nonsense, and you want to keep it up to date.

Unbreakable Linux?

[Sonny Yatsen]

Whenever a company starts calling their product unbreakable or indestructible or unhackable or whatever, I start thinking Titanic.

this slashdot article is a lie

[rubycodez]

this kernel is not the same as RedHat's, there are improvements geared toward Oracle's DBMS

engineering != rhetorical bile

[luis_a_espinal]

oh please, oracle customer complexities are a result from the oracle usage and not the motivation for it.

Oh wow, what a revelation. Using a complex software causes usage complexity. Here, have a banana as a price.

Yeah, usage of Oracle causes usage complexity. Does that mean that fine tuning a Linux distro to ease the pain of configuring a box suitable for Oracle products is something trivial, or non important, or what? What was exactly the point?

It doesn't even have to be for running Oracle database-related problems. When you run a EE container, be it JBoss or WebLogic (now a Oracle product) on a HP-UX, Linux or Solaris box that sits between a HTTP server and a database server, you are still bound to tune it for efficient performance according to the specifics of the system. I cannot think of anyone simply dropping a box with software on it on production without the necessary configuration.

That configuration is repetitive, tedious and specific for any non-trivial product for non-trivial usage. It is hardly an Oracle side effect. Typically sysadmins have to automate those configuration changes (or keep a golden ghost pre-configured image.) No matter what, that is still a burden. Better yet to have a vendor backing a set of configuration items already packaged into a turnkey solution.

oracle is one of those business providing useless solution so they can charge you twice for the consultancy.

Just because you don't like it and like to apply partisan ideologies to engineering, that does not mean that what they do is useless. It might be useless to you, might be useless in some (actually many) business contexts. But that does not mean anything on the general case where having an Oracle solution (not just an oracle database) is a useless solution.

Engineering != rhetorical bile.

Re:engineering != rhetorical bile

[luis_a_espinal]

There are sometimes unavoidable complexities, however I know first-hand companies providing 'product' and 'services' rapidly prioritize services. At first, the services may be a 'necessary evil' to enable the complex software, but the revenue quickly becomes intoxicating and soon any effort toward ease-of-use and out-of-the-box usability becomes a threat to services revenue.

This is absolutely true, but at least my experience with Oracle (for supporting Oracle databases), former BEA for their EE containers, and Sun and HP (for supporting their hardware) has not been like that. Rarely in the companies I've worked with I've seen the constant remora-like latching of consultancy as described here. In 10 years working in Solaris/HP-UX/Linux environments, I can count with less than half of my fingers a need of bringing expensive vendor consultancy. In fact, I can only remember three incidents within the last 8 years were we had to bring Sun engineers to help with catastrophic hardware failures... out of several dozens of hardware boxes running almost non-stop, 24x7 on production environments serving global traffic. And only two tech support tickets with BEA (and that was for container versions past their end-of-life.) Not bad to be honest.

Having capable sysadmins, network admins and database admins (which is a must in any large organization) ensure transparent operations without much incidences. This is not stuff that I'm pulling out of my ass. I have actual data from actual work places supporting applications that weren't sometimes that well-written, supporting actual operations.

The greatest costs have always been in software development and application-specific deployments. Not on expensive, vendor-specific consultancy fees. Maybe my work experiences as a developer and sysadmin make me an outlier, but when I talk to many of my colleagues on both sides of the UNIX/MS fence, that's their experience, too.

I would suggest people take what I say here with a grain of salt, for they might have actual sour experiences when it comes to vendor consulting draining their pockets. However, that has never been the case in any place I've worked in the last 10 years in large enterprises (nor in 15 years of software development.)

Re:But how is this not fraud?

[sprag]

RHEL 6 upgrades are free for those paying support, so that's not it.

By replacing the kernel it is no longer (even close to) RHEL 5 so ISV certifications are shot. Making oracle's linux unsupported by any 3rd party software other than what oracle itself has certified.

Re:Ohhh the truth!!!

[Nerdfest]

They want mid-range and high-end servers and support contracts for everything.

Well that's very nice, but aren't they interested in the business of those of us who don't? Large companies are strange beasts. They always seem to forget how they got to be large companies.

Re:Troll Harder

[youn]

you make a very good point... but be aware the guy mentions he is a FORMER employee of novell... it may sound like a tiny difference but it is significant... that means he moved on and he is not paid anymore by novell. generally when people quit it is because they are not satisfied with their former employee..

Re:But...

[WrongSizeGlass]

So it uses the NT kernel rather that the open sores Linsux kernel?

He said unbreakable, not unbearable.

Re:Rebranding something is surprising?

[JonJ]

False. Sony and Nintendo had created a partnership for the CD addon and of course would share both expenses and profits. The arrangement was similar to the Sony/Phillips arrangement (they both bore the cost of developing the Audio CD). Then Nintendo decided they didn't want a CD addon after all because it would be too easy to pirate the games, so they jumped ship, leaving Sony with all the incurred debt.

False. Sony had a deal that in essence gave them control and Nintendo naturally didn't want that and canceled the deal. They also made a deal with Phillips. It's not like it's poor old Sony here, they're bastards and the way you're trying to portray it is Nintendo just did it for shits and giggles. They didn't-