Oracle to Offer RedHat Support?

rs232 writes to tell us ITP is reporting that Oracle's Larry Ellison recently called Red Hat's ability to honor their support contracts effectively into question. Taking that claim one step further, Ellison claims that Oracle will soon start offering support for Red Hat Linux users. From the article: "The reason for this move, which Oracle executives later declined to provide any real detail on, is that Red Hat isn't doing a good enough job of providing that support itself, Ellison said. 'Red Hat is too small and does not do a very good job of supporting them [customers],' he said."

Re:Small potatoes

[schon]

What does this say about the largest and most successful Linux vendor out there?

It doesn't really say anything about it, [ibm.com] why?

Re:I wonder... Orcale distro on the way?

[Ctrl+Alt+De1337]

There has been a discussion [slashdot.org] partially about this before, and mentioned in the summary for that is about how Ellison has said does not intend to buy RedHat. As far as starting a distro, the consensus was that Oracle would be more likely to buy a distro that start one because it takes a long time to get a large and devoted community. Oracle certainly has the cash to do one, so don't rule it out, but it's probably not likely. Also, I think Ellison is too much of a control freak to support someone else's work for long if he doesn't have a say in it. I think he's probably got some backdoor channel with RedHat if he is going to support its products but not purchase the company.

Re:Small potatoes

[Anonymous Coward]

What does this say about the largest and most successful Linux vendor out there?

A would-be competitor is saying bad things about them. That's all.

Huh?

[kernelpanicked]

"What Red Hat does is every time to fix a bug you have to upgrade the operating system. They dont support old versions but just bug fixes That is not proper enterprise support and I think our customers are demanding that and I think you will see that coming from us."

I'm pretty sure this guy doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. Since RedHat soesn't change software versions after a release, but instead backports security and bugfixes to the released version, what older versions is he referring to?

Re:Good!

[sparkz]

RedHat (as with all distros) are very clear about what they do and do not support; they'll support unmodified binaries distributed by themselves on the (say) RHEL4 CDs; if you build your own kernel, you're on your own. If you build your own Apache and have trouble with it, you're on your own. Come to that, if you misconfigure Apache and have trouble with it, you're pretty much on your own. I have called RedHat support once, on behalf of a customer who had paid approx £3000 for support (three boxes, IIRC). The RHN download failed to authenticate to the MS IIS proxy server, even though the GUI clearly indicated that it should be able to. The RedHat zonk just said that it was a MS problem. The MS proxy server was working normally, as it had been doing for ages; the RedHat Network GUI had a "MS Proxy Server" option, which took authentication details, but then failed to work properly. (It was a few years ago, I forget the precise details). I found a small perl script on SourceForge which did the authentication for me, providing a "localhost proxy server" and was able to patch the newly installed server. As I spent most of my time working with Sun at the time, I was not at all impressed by the slippery-shoulder attitude; the staff just didn't have the in-depth knowledge of the OS, and (even more importantly) there wasn't the infrastructure in place to escalate to those who did know.

Re:Well could be worse for red hat

[Anonymous Coward]

My organization is a customer of Redhat. We are *extremely* dissatisfied with Redhat's support. My support calls generally stay open for a minimum of two months, with some taking over a year. Their support is far worse than Microsoft's, and abyssmal in comparison to Sun's.

About a year and a half ago we had a problem with nss_ldap. After waiting months for them to fix the problem, we looked through the source code, spotted and fixed the problem, and sent them the fix. After doing so we had to wait two more months for them to provide us with a supported hotfix. The package *still* isn't included in the RHEL4 disto.

We had the same problem with RHEL3, but we hadn't actually run into it until recently. Not suprisingly, we were denied support for RHEL3 because it was going into maintanence mode two weeks after we notified them we were having the same problem with RHEL3.

This is just *one* of the numerous support problems we've had. I could probably give three or four more example just like this one and we've only had Redhat support for 3 years...

Re:Too small?

[molarmass192]

The surest way to perform non-patch release upgrades with Oracle is full export, install, full import. In place upgrades across major versions are inconsistent. Yeah, it's not the FASTEST way, but it's the best option, plus you get to compress extents, at least up until you get into the 300+ GB range. Once you reach that level, the downtime required just becomes too long. In place upgrades have to be practiced because the steps virtually always change between releases, it's clearly documented right there on pages 52 through 78 of the release notes!!! ;-)

Sadly it is true - Red Hat support does suck

[ams001]

and anyone who says differently obviously has not tried using their support much. Red Hat readily admit to their customers (our company being one) that they do not have enough developers to provide support. I quote from one of our oustanding support requests:

I have talked to our developers and Product Management the last days and unfortunately we currently couldn't allocate enough developer ressources to get this issue fixed.

I will try to check when the currently estimated time for this fix is. -- Response of 18 Jan to support query filed 4 Aug 2005, still no engineer assigned...

On average we get a 6 month delay before the report reaches an engineer, and when it does the first thing we get asked is if the problem is still occurring (read fixed this yourselves yet?). Don't get me wrong. I love Red Hat and the work it does. We took on RHEL V4 instead of FC for the core services of our company, primarily for the support aspect. Out of the several support requests filed we only have had prompt decent support for one of them - and that was only because their web support had gone down and they were taking phone support. It really makes me wonder what the benefit of RHEL is over FC if support is near non-existant. Or is some big corporate with RHEL rolled out across all its servers consuming all of Red Hat's support staff, denying the small fries any look in to support?

No wonder Oracle are looking to move in

Re:How much does this suck for Novell???

[Snowy.White]

I have seen this before while working for Oracle Support on the long forgotten CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) suite. This was initially hailed as the best of breed apps under the Oracle umbrella. Support for third party apps extended to logging the calls and passing directly to the relevant third party software support. However, after a year or two, Larry said how bad the idea was since Oracle is lumped with supporting all these apps for the third parties. And what actually happened to those third party apps (and/or companies)???
Here's the list:
- System Ess - Oracle has written a replacement module called Oracle OM (Order Management) with the same functionality,
- GEMMS - Oracle bought the comapnay (repackaged the software as OPM - Oracle Process Manufacturing),
- Empac - a replacement written as EAM (Enterprise Asset Management) having the same functionality,
- Manugistics - left intact (probably because it was the most stable system in the whole suite),

there were other companies that had a software package that Oracle did not have or was superior to Oracle's and they were swollowed up, eg. Peoplesoft (inc JDEdwards) and some smaller security companies.

Judging by the past record, Oracle's next move is not hard to predict...

And that is different from anyone else - how?

[anomaly]

I've worked with "enterprise" software for the past 8 years. My experience is that no vendor fixes everything we consider broken, and the largest vendors fix the least for us. The best overall support we get is from a 3-5 person company supporting a custom application they wrote for us. As far as COTS software is concerned, we've been working with an "up and coming" vendor (living on VC cash) who has been pretty responsive. The two largest software companies in the world have been little help to us, in terms of providing fixes to code that we consider broken.

Someone is complaining about RedHat support? And that someone is Oracle? Puh leeze!

I have yet to be impressed with the quality and responsiveness of enterprise vendors.