Oracle Applications DBA Blog

Unbreakable Linux

This year from the Oracle Open World one of the most exciting/interesting and a little surprising news  for me was Oracle's announcement on Oracle Unbreakable Linux or the Oracle Enterprise Linux.
Being a die  hard Linux endorser myself this made be stand up and pay attention. This year’s OOW I expected most of  the focus to be around the Release 12 and Fusion Applications. So the Linux decision did come  unexpected. But then again you do get the unexpected at OOWs ;)

But what does this mean? Well, according to oracle they plan to extend their "world class support" which they have currently for their enterprise products to RedHat Linux Enterprise 3 and 4.This the plan to deliver through a subscribed Unbreakable Linux Network(ULN).

Oracle's affair with Linux is not new or surprising in anyway. In fact  if i re collect correctly somewhere in June 2002 Oracle  along with DELL and EMC announced their commitment to Linux by developing enterprise class solution for the Linux platform.

There was always an anticipation that oracle coming out with its own Linux distribution but as of now  the Redwood Shores company seems to have been satisfied with just taking over the support of one of top  selling Linux distribution.

This is a commercial paid 24X7 support which will include OS patches, bug fixes kernel enhancements and multilingual support in 27 different languages. And perhaps the most unexpected part of this support is  that according to Oracle you need not be an oracle product customer to qualify for this support. Which  means Oracle is planning to hand out support for RedHat Enterprise Linux regardless of the applications  running on them.

Now that sure would have rung some alarm bells in the RedHat camp. They are currently the only vendor to  provide commercial support and bug fixes for Redhat Linux, with oracle's announcement to support RedHat Linux enterprise with bug fixes for the current, future and back versions of RedHat Linux Redhat's market share is surely headed for a change.

I read this nice post 'Partners, to The End? ' by Kevin Closson

Redhat has already hit back with 'Unfakable Linux'> RedHat Responds :)

According to Oracle.

"With the scale of our support organization we can provide much better Linux support at a much lower price,"

"We have the expertise and infrastructure to improve substantially the quality of support for enterprise  
Linux customers."

More on the Unbreakable Linux

Oracle Unbreakable Linux FAQ
Oracle Press Release