Blog: Shawn Rogers

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Oracle Open World - Linux and Redhat and Oracle, Oh My!

Following the NASDAQ closing Larry Ellison took the stage and talked about his vision of the future and the importance of the grid architecture. He discussed why grids are faster than mainframes, lower in cost, delivered high performance and scalability. If you mis-estimate on a mainframe your in trouble Grids will allow expansion at a lower cost. It’s capacity on demand. It is also a fault tolerant environment and even the best server will experience down time. Oracle has been promoting various versions of grids or clusters for years, now they are delivering 128 machine grids on Linux.

He discussed why Linux made best sense as an operating system to support grids, open source, standards based plus it wasn’t owned by that company in Redmond. The open source side of Linux allowed Oracle to tweak the code and deliver the operating system they needed. They have played a leading role in Linux development and community building.

Version upgrades and bug fixes are what Ellison feels is slowing the adoption of Linux the need to wait or patch isn’t something enterprise customers are comfortable with. The other issue is ownership of the Linux code and intellectual property concerns of customers.

Then Ellison rolled out the big news. Unbreakable Linux 2.0
Oracle will offer full support for Red Hat Linux customers they will offer the fixes, patches and all support that is presently available with Red Hat the service will cost less than half of what RedHat charges. They are offering the service not just to Oracle customers but to anyone who uses RedHat support. They will stay synchronized with the red hat version. Plus they are providing a higher level of support than Red hat can.

For the next 90 days you can test drive it and see how it works. All prices are cut in half during this period.

This is huge news! Oracle will also indemnify you from any lawsuit concerning the usage of Linux code. This program actually puts Oracle in the position to be the default leader in the Linux community. It will have true impact on many companies.

Obviously the folks at RedHat can’t be happy but what about the ripple effect for operating systems, can you say Microsoft? How will they be able to respond to the power of an open source community that updates and bug fixes at the speed of light coupled with the power of a company the size of Oracle supporting it. Oracle has just found the backdoor to the market and will become a huge thorn in the side of Microsoft.

Dell is on board for their PowerEdge servers, Intel is also on board, Hewlett Packard will support the new program, as well as AMD, EMC, BMC, Network Appliance, AutoDesk, and Mercury.

Technorati Tags: Oracle Open World, Business Intelligence, Larry Ellison, Linux

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