Tux Watch

Oracle’s move into the Linux world through its new product combined with Operating System platform support strategy and distribution, “Unbreakable Linux” has already caused an unrest in the market that was already buying Linux support from companies like Redhat and Novell. Most of the industry thinks that it might be possible that Oracle will only be supported on platforms blessed by Oracle itself. The FAQs available on Oracle’s website speak of such a ‘Transition Path for Red Hat and Novell customers’ on Page#4 [here]:

“What is the transition path for existing Red Hat and Novell Linux users?
Transition is very easy. Existing Red Hat and Novell Linux customers that move to the Unbreakable Linux support program may receive credit for

the remainder of their existing support contract. For example, if a Red Hat customer has a support contract expiring on July 1, 2008 and the customer purchases a three year Enterprise Linux Premier Support contract on March 1, 2007 as a replacement, then the customer will be entitled to support under their Oracle contract from March 1, 2007 through July 1, 2011, three years after the customer’s Red Hat contract expires.”

In the last FAQ on the same page, it is stated that:

“Will Oracle continue to support other operating systems?
Yes. Oracle has a thirty-year history of supporting Oracle products on numerous popular operating systems. Unbreakable Linux does nothing to decrease our commitment to other operating systems such as WindowsTM, other distributions of Linux, or UNIXTM environments.”

This again creates a very vague idea. If the intention had been to support all the above Operating System Platforms, why launch Unbreakable platform in the first place. The major advantage on Unbreakable Linux will be pre-installed Oracle configurations like install and run and not the first install the OS, secure the OS, install the underlying application servers and additional configurations to the OS while installing Oracle. Instead, Oracle will be “Ready 2 Run” on Unbreakable Linux. For companies that don’t want to get into the hassle of unsupported configuration, they would opt for the Unbreakable Linux support plans even though Oracle says:

“Will Oracle continue to support customers that are using Oracle products on Red Hat RHEL, Novell SLES, and Asianux?
Yes. Oracle is fully committed to all of its customers that have deployed or will deploy Oracle products on other Linux distributions that are currently supported, including Red Hat, Novell and Asianux. We will continue to certify and offer support for Oracle products running on these Linux distributions. For operating system issues, users will need to work with their vendor.”

This means that the Oracle software support is Oracle’s headache while the Operating System is the client’s vendor’s headache so this is an evident disclaimer. Oracle will only answer support to its own Unbreakable Linux OS platform. So for serious companies that cannot afford to run unsupported Oracle on OS configurations, they are destined to migrate their existing RedHat and Novell SuSE installations to Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux.

Oracle really knows that it has a niche in the market over FOSS RDBMS like MySQL and PostGRE unless Red Hat and Novell Suse Linux distributions add these systems to their OS by default. Another possible scenario would also be to introduce the pre-installed and pre-configured version of Compiere ERP or any other FOSS ERP to break this grip but again it isn’t going to be easy.

Even after the above debate, a small but important question comes to my mind based upon my experience from previous enterprise Oracle and ERP deployments. If the vendor starts dictating what support plan it’s client should buy, it may be bye bye for its support by its client. A small example would that for any company already running Oracle on say maybe 1500 CPUs, it would prove to be hell for it to shift its entire infrastructure to a new Unbreakable Linux OS environment. Possibly, within 1/4th of the cost to migrate and buy support licenses, it is better to hire an outsourcing partner to help it manage that existing infrastructure without Oracle’s OS platform support.