The Linux Beacon--Oracle Touts Unbreakable Linux, Adds Clusterware Support

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Volume 8, Number 14 -- April 8, 2008

Oracle Touts Unbreakable Linux, Adds Clusterware Support

Published: April 8, 2008

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

It has been a year and a half since database, middleware, and application software powerhouse Oracle pulled a CentOS maneuver and created a variant of Red Hat's Enterprise Linux distribution and started selling less costly support services for this so-called Oracle Unbreakable Linux. To make Unbreakable Linux even more attractive to customers, Oracle is throwing some extra goodies pulled from its Real Application Clusters (RAC) clustering software to customers who use its Linux distro and support.

Building a commercial Linux business takes time, and it has taken Oracle a while to go beyond the handful of customers it initially touted when it launched its support services and variants of RHEL 3 and 4 back in October 2006. But with the company having 12,000 paying customers using one of its commercially supported and closed source databases (and over 200,000 downloads for the latest 11g database announced last fall) and over 55,000 paying middleware customers (not including the future BEA Systems WebLogic users), as well as 37,000 companies running one of its myriad application suites, to say that Oracle is hooked into the software budgets of midrange and enterprise customers is an understatement.

That large software customer base is one reason that Oracle decided to get into the Linux racket to begin with, of course, since some companies were asking for the mythical one-throat-to-choke for their entire software stack. And with a clone of RHEL and the Xen hypervisor (launched last year as OracleVM) plus BEA middleware and existing Oracle Fusion middleware, Oracle can offer a complete software stack with some variation, from the hypervisor up to the application, for tens of thousands of customers. Only Red Hat, which does not have a database of its own or an application stack, and Microsoft, which is still getting its hypervisor out the door, can say they come as close. Sun Microsystems, now that it owns MySQL, can start to make similar claims, but Sun doesn't have application software, either. And even when IBM owns the whole systems software stack, as it does on System i midrange and System z mainframe machinery and which it can on System p AIX boxes if customers opt for DB2 databases and WebSphere middleware, alas, IBM still does not have any IBM-branded application software to put on any of these boxes. (IBM used to have a killer application software business two and three decades ago, but ceded this market to try to become the Switzerland of systems.)

So it comes as no surprise, then, given all this software business at Oracle, that the company has been able to get more than 2,000 different companies to sign up for Unbreakable Linux licenses and pay for support contracts. Oracle says it has an 82 percent share of database shipments on Linux, which has to mean based on revenues, not shipments, because millions of Linux boxes have MySQL and PostgreSQL installed on them. It is not clear if Oracle 10g and 11g database shops are the early adopters of Unbreakable Linux, but companies who had deployed RHEL 3 or RHEL 4--and now RHEL 5--to support Oracle databases are the obviously low hanging fruit for Oracle as it peddles Unbreakable Linux. Oracle is, presumably, one of those customers, as it has over 10,000 Linux machines running in its own data centers, which support email, product development, and other unspecified applications.

To rub in the 2,000th customer milestone and to sweeten the Unbreakable Linux deal a little bit, Oracle has also announced that it is making the Clusterware clustering software that is the foundation of RAC, available to Unbreakable Linux shops for free so long as they have paid for basic or premier support contracts. This clustering software provides heartbeat and basic cluster services and can be used independently of Oracle's RAC software (which copes with managing the cluster) or the Oracle Cluster File System 2 (OCFS2) file system that was contributed to the Linux kernel back in 2006. Clusterware can be used to provide two-node high availability clustering for Linux machines, as opposed to the multi-node clustering that RAC enabled, and as such can be used to cluster application servers and databases--even non-Oracle databases, in this case.

"Based on Oracle's two decades of experience in cluster software, Oracle Clusterware for Oracle Unbreakable Linux is one of the first fully supported clustering solutions available for Linux," claimed Angelo Pruscino, vice president of server technologies at Oracle. "This announcement is yet another proof point highlighting Oracle's commitment to advancing Linux through technology enhancements and enterprise-quality Linux support--all of which make Linux more scalable, available, cost-effective and overall a better enterprise platform for our customers."

Ironically, since Red Hat's Global File System and Cluster Suite are part of RHEL 5, Oracle also supports these products, which provide similar functionality to the Clusterware and OCFS2 combo.

Oracle Unbreakable Linux support costs $399 per year for a basic contract (9x5 business) on a two-socket or smaller server, or $1,199 per year for a premier contract (24x7 support). On larger machines, basic support costs $999 per year and premier support costs $1,999 per year.