Oracle and Red Hat begin battle for the Enterprise

Salvance writes "Yahoo News (via ComputerWire) is reporting that Oracle and Red Hat are turning up the heat in the battle over Oracle's new enterprise Linux offering. While Oracle claims they'll be able to offer their 'Unbreakable' version of Red Hat's Linux offering for half the price, Red Hat asserts that all the important security and hardware certifications would be invalidated on Oracle's offering.

At this point, the only thing that's certain is that Red Hat needs to figure out how to keep their large Oracle Enterprise clients on board or risk becoming a takeover target (undoubtably, with Oracle leading the list of potentially bidders)."

Re:That's great!

[jmyers]

I've been using Red Hat since 1995 with starting with version 2.0. I have used every version since including every Fedora release. I use RHEL4 with a contract for a production system at work. I have never really had a problem with the OS. I cant say that I've ever had an unstable system except when I did major customization and deviated way off the official software versions.

I have also tried Ubuntu, but I really don't see much difference from Fedora. It just has the mp3 support, etc already installed. Even though it is an inconvenience, I like Red Hat's policy towards non-free software.

As for Oracle, they just don't have my trust for support on a production Linux system. Red Hat has been around and stayed the course as a trustworthy vendor. I expect a lot of sysadmins are just not going to trust Oracle offering. They seem to be looking for a free ride rather than to provide a value added service.

Re:That's great!

[lucabrasi999]

First of all, Sun is no longer a server powerhouse. So, they are a poor example.

Second of all, you obviously have never worked in a large enterprise. In large enterprises, they pay millions of dollars for critical applications. The last thing a large enterprise would want to depend on is some teenager providing free support on an IRC channel. In addition, if I am running SAP/Oracle or some other critical vendor application, I would only install it on an operating system that is actually supported by the vendor. The last time I checked my present client's PeopleSoft (now Oracle) support policy, Ubuntu was no where to be found. Hell, they only had a few Red Hat options. I doubt I could find more than a handful of enterprise applications that support Ubuntu.

Re:That's great!

[blueflash2o]

they pay millions of dollars for critical applications. The last thing a large enterprise would want to depend on is some teenager providing free support on an IRC channel.

They don't have to they can pay Canonical for support which is the ubuntu founders company. http://news.com.com/2008-1012_3-6130484.html?part= rss&tag=6130484&subj=news [com.com]

Re:Oracle and RedHat have this in common...

[nuzak]

> if nobody is using Redhat for Oracle, then Redhat may just stop being produced.

You think that Oracle wasn't looking for precisely that outcome? Larry Ellison is pissed that Redhat dared move into middleware space by buying JBoss, and now he wants to cut their legs out from under them. It's nothing more or less than a a personal vendetta from Larry Ellison -- this guy makes Steve Ballmer look like Mark Shuttleworth.

Re:That's great!

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't have to they can pay Canonical for support which is the ubuntu founders company.

For large Enterprises, having a supported Linux distribution isn't enough. In environments like that you are typically running obscenely expensive mission critical software and for optimum stability you want to run it on an OS or in this case a Linux distribution which isn't just supported by the OS vendor but which is also supported and recommended by the manufacturer of your expensive mission critical software. In addition you might have other restrictions such as government mandated demands that the distribution be certified for a certain security level etc... If you are a large Enterprise all this combines drastically narrow down your selection of Linux distributions. You can get an mission critical Oracle Database up and running on any Linux distribution with a bit of patience, including Ubuntu, but Oracle only does extensive tests on it's databases for a finite set of Linux distributions and the moment you have a problem with your Oracle database running on Ubuntu and call Oracle support they might leave you sitting with your problem because Ubuntu Linux is not on that list of Linux distributions for which they certify Oracle products (for Oracle DB 10g that list contains: RHEL4, RHEL3, SLES9). Software vendor are quite merciless that way they have little patience for people who don't follow their recommendations about basic stuff like recommended Linux distributions.