Oracle to Offer RedHat Support? 223
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."
Interesting turn of events (Score:4, Interesting)
I am sure people at Redhat are happy with that (Score:4, Interesting)
MySQL? (Score:5, Interesting)
Oracle thinks Redhat Support is poor? (Score:5, Interesting)
Good! (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's the rumor I've heard: (Can't name the source, sorry.)
If a single mega-company were to migrate to Linux and rely on Red Hat for support, it would completely consume all of Red Hat's support resources, and then some. The rumor goes that this is one of the main problems with large companies that want to move to Linux: the support capacity simply isn't there.
So, the reasoning goes, Red Hat is actually glad when projects like CentOS [centos.org] and Oracle support [itp.net] take off: Red Hat knows that it can't support everybody, it knows that it needs for it's platform to "win," it knows that there is incredible value in winning alone, and so: These developments are all good for Red Hat.
After a little research, I find this article [com.com] that supports what I've heard.
A lot of us are thinking about these things in terms of home users. We don't give a damn for support- we just fix it ourselves, service it ourselves. It's part of owning a computer. But in the business, I understand they think about things differently: Support becomes a primary thing. It's not optional, even when you have internal IT people on staff.
I have to agree... (Score:5, Interesting)
A significant part of my job is Linux sysadmin work, using licensed Red Hat Enterprise products. The tools are (for the most part) useful, reliable, and complete. The problem is, the enterprise distros are severely lacking in their packages and features.
Recently, while building a distributed mail system (multiple servers in the mail chain, multidomain support and virtual mailboxes) on RHEL4,
The recommended version for mail and database servers (Enterprise Server) does indeed have packages for Postfix (our preferred mail app) and MySQL available, but none of the Postfix packages have MySQL support enabled (Postfix has good MySQL support, including DB connection caching through a proxy interface). This effectively meant that none of the dozens of excellent mail administration tools out there would be available to us, and we couldn't put together a mail system that didn't rely on flat files in some fashion or another, without setting up parallel services (LDAP) solely to support mail services.
I built the server once on Red Hat ES and when all was said and done, I ended up with seven major components having to be compiled either from source, or rebuilt RPMs with modified spec files and/or compile flags. This doesn't bother me, except for the fact that the whole reason my employer pays thousands upon thousands of dollars for an enterprise Linux was so that we could stick to standard packages, so that if a particular machine has issues, we don't have to rely on one person to know what's going on.
I can't imagine we're the only paying client Red Hat has that wants to run a mail server that relies on a database server. It wouldn't chagrin me to change mail server or database packages (I've used most of the common ones), but looking deeper just led me to the realization that no matter which packages or paths I took, I'd still be stuck with the same issues.
Until Red Hat gains better flexibility, timeliness, and awareness of their client needs, perhaps Ellison is on the ball with his visions of supporting the clients directly. I'm guessing he won't be supporting MySQL, though. And after rebuilding the server on Debian stable, with all features we desired being available in the core distro, we're happier.
And I'm the only guy here who groks Debian well enough to run it, sigh.
Too small? (Score:4, Interesting)
Let me count the ways:
I'd venture to guess more than 3/4 of its technical staff is dedicated to writing useless bug-ridden java guis (each requiring differing versions of java) with absolutely no interoperability between them. None of them can be scripted and they're all pieces of shit.
And let's not start with sqlplus. You think they could just hire one guy who may be able to put some readline support in there so it could get with the times.
Another good example is security. How many employees does oracle have dedicated to their security team? I'd venture to guess they have one monkey. Not even a person. Do I need to bring up the unpatched vulnerabilities that are hundreds of days old?
Now how about bug fixing? Anyone ever upgrade a production Oracle instance? No? You know why? Because you fucking can't. You have to wait until the latest patch has at least 1 year of testing because upgrades, even minor bug fixes, break in spectacular ways. So, because noone installs them, there's never any testing.
How much does this suck for Novell??? (Score:5, Interesting)
The big question here is, in my opinion, what does this say about Novell and Oracle in the enterprise? It could be argued that Oracle had already invested so much time and effort into nuturing their product line on Red Hat that a move to SUSE would be cumbersome. But, still, I would argue that Oracle's better move would be to deepen the Novell relationship. Novell has shown a consistent committment to enterprise products, Oracle included - and has the track record of good enterprise support.
Personally, I can only say that I believe a move like this on Oracle's part would only serve to strengthen the position of Linux in the enterprise. As I alluded to above, the largest hurdle Red Hat could not overcome in my enterprise was poor support - something Oracle could easily address. So, in the end, it's a win for the industry...
But, why not just buy Red Hat? And, to my original question, how much does this hurt Novell?
Re:MySQL? (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, Oracle will get into the OS biz. Here's why. (Score:4, Interesting)
So the real question is indeed, as already noted in this thread, will Oracle code, package, and support a particular Linux distro? I think it has to go that way. Here are two reasons why.
1. Enterprises use huge application-oriented technology stacks -- hardware, OS, DBMS, app server, OLTP apps, analytics, etc., etc. They increasingly resist paying "value prices" for all those layers. Thus, each vendor wants ITS tiers to be value-priced, while the other layers are commoditized, both to free up money for that vendor, and to generally undermine the other big companies. Sun likes giving away DBMS. SAP is pushing cheap DBMS. Microsoft introduced low-cost DBMS. And so Oracle needs to strike back by, for example, ensuring that the OS gets commoditized.
2. Oracle code is what Scott McNealy would call "a big hairball". Customers need to be protected from the complexity. Integrating the DBMS and OS is a potential way to do that.
Re:Well could be worse for red hat (Score:2, Interesting)
I wonder if Ellison understands the industry or just makes stuff up as he goes along. CIO Insight Magazine [cioinsight.com] named Red Hat #1 for offering value to its customers two years in a row. Oracle doesn't even seem to appear in the top 10.
It'll be interesting to see how the market responds to such an offer.
Re:Way to..... (Score:3, Interesting)
And the other question is: will Oracle work on the product releasing all sorts of products back to the community as Red Hat has done (tux, netscape directory server, kernel improvements too many to list, etc, etc), or will they just tell people which nobs to tweek to get their $$$ commercial product running? I'm guessing the latter, and the original post was right: Ellison is a dick.
This is great news for Redhat (Score:5, Interesting)
Oracle says they plan to support Redhat. Not SUSE. Not some Oracle distro. So that right there is a stamp of approval on the entire Redhat "platform" if you will. Now there will be less fear that Oracle might make another distro its favorite soon- they would not hire a bunch of people to support Redhat if they planned to move to SUSE next month. Also this gives the Redhat+Oracle platform something you can't get with Solaris+Oracle or Windows+Oracle- a one stop shop for support. Redhat will be the ONLY OS that Oracle can completely provide support for. That means as of now Redhat is the best platform for Oracle. Period.
Oracle plans to support Redhat. Not CentOS or Fedora or some other free Redhat. That means if someone wants a solution for Oracle supported Redhat they still have to BUY Redhat's OS from the company. There might be some people (in fact I know one for sure) that might be holding out on switching to a Redhat Oracle solution (from a Solaris or Windows one) because they want support from a company far bigger than Redhat (like Sun and MS are). Now they have that. Plus I would not be surprised if many companies (do to ignorance, comfort, whatever) double dip- buy both Redhat and Oracle Redhat support. This can only grow Redhat's marketshare!
Its a win-win for Redhat- there platform becomes more stable and accepted, they will maybe get more people to buy their OS (that would prefer Oracle support compared to support from an OS vender like Microsoft or Redhat) and they get tons of free press.
I would be mad if I was at Novell or Sun today.
Re:Interesting turn of events (Score:2, Interesting)
Regards,
Steve
Someone wake me when... (Score:3, Interesting)
We spend well north of 300k per year with Oracle, and I've been disgusted with the support we receive from them. Coming from a mysql / Postgresql background, I was expecting a lot more when I started working with and supporting Oracle systems, but Oracle's support staff are consistently hard to understand and not able to function when your problem falls outside their script. Escalation can be time consuming and even then you're not guaranteed a solution.
If the answer isn't in metalink, you're in trouble.
A couple of weeks ago we ran into a problem with a RAC cluster. After 3 hours of downtime, we logged a call with Veritas as Oracle were insisting that Veritas was the problem. I really wished we logged that call a LOT earlier... The guy at Veritas took about 2 minutes to explain which Oracle component was at fault and how to fix it.
Having said that, Red Hat support is pretty appalling too. I've had some classic responses to support questions from them, including advice NOT to hotswap disks on an HP DL380 (despite it being designed for this).
Mostly, I just dislike Red Hat lately because of their draconian licensing policies on some of their products... I can't even get eval versions of products that have my code in them
What DOES this mean? (Score:3, Interesting)
By quick, I mean two days billable.
A client was demonstrating an application using Oracle running on EL3. Hardware platform was a SUN v40z, with 8GB of memory. The client had a "simple" problem -- the sysem was only using half of the available memory.
Solution? Of course its obvious. Simply deploy the large memory kernel. But, they had three Oracle people on site, who were not familiar. The client had brought in someone else, who had no clue. I was happy, because I get to bill at emergency rates (a demo was scheduled for less than a week away). The client also wanted me to look at kernel tuning for Oracle.
If Oracle starts providing this service, it will, of course, cut me out of the loop. But I don't think it can change right away. Oracle has to provide a lot of internal training first. I expect that there will be work "in them thar hills" for the next two years...
Ratboy