Oracle Offers Certified Linux Configurations to Cut Deployment Time

Published: June 20, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

One of the great things about the IT market is that to do any task, there are dozens if not hundreds of different ways to skin a cat. This is, however, also the curse of IT. With so many different options for something as seemingly simple as a basic server and software stack, standardization is something that a lot of customers crave. People don't want to make decisions all the time, which is why the LAMP stack on X64 hardware is so popular. (LAMP is also popular because it is good software that gets the job done at low cost.)

The desire to make it easier and cheaper to deploy software on Linux-X64 platforms, and to better compete with the LAMP stack, is why Oracle has launched pre-tested, validated, and supported configurations of its 10g database software on various X64 iron and running Red Hat and Novell Linuxes. These validated configurations, by the way, go the extra step of certifying that the hardware, operating system, and database are completely certified, top to bottom, inside and out. Normally, Oracle just certifies its database for a general processor architecture and operating system platform, no specific servers, storage, and adapters.

You can see the full details of the configurations by clicking here. There are five validated Linux configurations (which are dubbed with the 1.0 release) so far coming from Oracle, which are deployed using the Oracle 10g 10.2.0.2 release with the Real Application Clusters extensions. They include:

• A four-socket PowerEdge 6850 Xeon MP-based server from Dell using EMC Clarion CX500 arrays and supporting Red Hat's Enterprise Linux 4 AS and ES variants with Update 3.
• A two-socket ProLiant DL380 Xeon DP-based server from Hewlett-Packard that uses the same RHEL 4 Update 3 software and HP's own StorageWorks MSA 1000 SAN arrays.
• A four-socket ProLiant DL585 Opteron-based server from HP running RHEL 4 Update 3 and using the MSA 1000 arrays.
• An BladeCenter blade server chassis from IBM using its two-socket, Xeon DP-based HS20 blade servers running Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 with Service Pack 2; this setup is equipped with IBM's own TotalStorage DS4500 SAN arrays.
• An two-socket eServer 326 Opteron-based server with NetApp FAS900 network-attached storage arrays running SLES 9 with Service Pack 3.

Obviously, all of these three server vendors will be scrambling to get more of their Linux iron certified, and others will want to have their platforms involved, too. And, it is probably reasonable to guess that Sun Microsystems is working behind the scenes to get its Solaris 10 on equal footing with Linux.