Main Categories

• Microsoft
• Hardware
• Software
• Network
• Security
• Internet
• Open Source
• Apple Mac
• Wireless Mobile

Top Articles

Archives

• Oct 2005
• Nov 2005
• Dec 2005
• Jan 2006
• Feb 2006
• Mar 2006
• Apr 2006
• May 2006
• Jun 2006
• Jul 2006
• Aug 2006
• Sep 2006

Oracle Wants to Hold Your Linux-Leery Hand

Oracle is catering to the Linuxleery announcing June the Oracle Validated Configuration program to provide pretested architectures for running Oracle on Linux.
 
The free offering includes specs for common mixes of software hardware storage and networking.

The architectures are designed to lift the burden of pricey testing off of customers' backs and get those customers up and running faster while also helping to improve performance scalability and reliability.

Wim Coekaerts the company's senior director of Linux Engineering said the program is a natural outgrowth of Oracle's Linux test lab which it set up a few years back to test the Linux kernel.

"As we've done the customer advisory board specifically for Linux customers one thing bigger customers keep bringing up is that for large deployments that don't have Linux in house to go from there to getting the operating system the Oracle stack etc. it takes them quite a few months to go from not having anything to getting something like this running in production" he said.

"Frequently they came back to us and said 'It would be really nice if you could spend some of that time we spent putting things together for us instead of our trail and error work'" he said.

Oracle hooked up with "pretty much everyone who matters in hardware" as partners in the endeavor.

That includes hardware partners Dell EMC HewlettPackard IBM Network Appliance and Sun.

Platform technology partners that took part include AMD and Intel. Novell and Red Hat chipped in on the operating system front and HBA (Host Bus Adapter) Driver partners include Emulex and QLogic.

The Oracle Validated Configuration program doesn't mean that Oracle won't support other configurations Coekaerts said.

What it does mean is that customers will be able to roll out Linux and Oracle on some standard configurations much faster.

"We're hoping this will reduce the amount of time the more missioncritical setups will need to go live" he said.

"That's the specific target of this: where a customers wants to have a number of months of stability and if they run into a relatively basic snag&;or problems they didn't want to see&;and they feel less comfortable with what we're doing&;that will all basically go away."

One thing that customers wanted on top of the configurations is a promise that the program won't lag behind current hardware availability Coekaerts said as so often happens with these types of programs.

So Oracle has made sure with its partners that configuration generation for the program lies upstream as they cook up new hardware.

"Usually if it takes a year to start with a certain model from a vendor a year later you have the configuration and the IT department will say 'OK this is now the standard configuration for the company' but by then there are new drivers and whatnot and things will break" he said.

This program will be different though. "As new servers etc. come out the new hardware will be rolled in immediately and validated and available for customers to rely on" he said.

The configurations are now available at the Oracle Technology Network site.

Recent Articles