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With free clustering for Unbreakable Linux, Oracle goes after Red Hat (SearchEnterpriseLinux)

[Posted March 27, 2008 by cook]

SearchEnterpriseLinux reports on Oracle's move to give away clustering software for its Unbreakable Linux distribution. "In an apparent competitive swipe at Red Hat Inc., Oracle Corp.announced on Wednesday, March 26, at InfoWorld's Open Source Business Conference that it would add Clusterware to its year-old Oracle Unbreakable Linux support program for all basic and premium-package customers -- and for free. By harnessing the collective processing power and storage capacity of multiple servers into a single system, Clusterware enables this system to be centrally monitored and managed."
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With free clustering for Unbreakable Linux, Oracle goes after Red Hat (SearchEnterpriseLinux)

Posted Mar 27, 2008 21:27 UTC (Thu) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] (14 responses) 

They try to beat RedHat, with (more or less) RedHat's own product?

Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

Less

Posted Mar 27, 2008 22:14 UTC (Thu) by AnswerGuy (guest, #1256) [Link] (3 responses) 


   "... (more or less) RedHat's own product?"

Without really trying to diminish Red Hat's own contributions to the community nor their own
in-house development efforts I'd have to consider it "less" their own product and "more" the
product of the open source community at large.

So Oracle can proceed with a clear conscience (as much as any corporation can be described as
having a conscience) so long as they contribute back to the community at large and abide by
the licenses, trademark rules, etc.

(Yeah, I know they are playing out their own games ... they are being kind to Red Hat and
there's probably a lot of back room politics, knee-biting and back stabbing going on.  That's
between them and Red Hat and we can pick sides or choose to be neutral or even to condemn them
both).

Less

Posted Mar 28, 2008 8:11 UTC (Fri) by Los__D (guest, #15263) [Link] (2 responses) 

Of course, but RedHat is actually doing something to (let's call it) assemble the product, and
is being a big part of the development.

Oracle is just replacing stickers, AFAIK.

More

Posted Mar 28, 2008 18:43 UTC (Fri) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link] (1 responses)

Perhaps you are not familiar with ocfs or ocfs2?

More

Posted Mar 29, 2008 0:27 UTC (Sat) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] 

Or btrfs for that matter
http://oss.oracle.com/projects/btrfs/

With free clustering for Unbreakable Linux, Oracle goes after Red Hat (SearchEnterpriseLinux)

Posted Mar 27, 2008 22:26 UTC (Thu) by marduk (guest, #3831) [Link] (7 responses) 

Them in addition to the many other distributions that are based on or borrow from Red Hat...
(Suse, CentOS, Mandriva, etc.).


I actually think this is a good thing, even for Red Hat customers.  I have always thought that
Red Hat's charging extra for clustering was bad for the consumer, and perhaps the Oracle move
will cause them to change their products to stay competitive.

With free clustering for Unbreakable Linux, Oracle goes after Red Hat (SearchEnterpriseLinux)

Posted Mar 27, 2008 22:29 UTC (Thu) by lmb (subscriber, #39048) [Link] (2 responses) 

openSUSE and Enterprise Server are not quite based on Red Hat.

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server also happens to include clustering "for free" in the base.

Compared to both RHEL's and SLES's clustering products though, Clusterware is not exactly hot.
Proprietary, limited in features ...

With free clustering for Unbreakable Linux, Oracle goes after Red Hat (SearchEnterpriseLinux)

Posted Mar 29, 2008 0:47 UTC (Sat) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (1 responses) 

> Proprietary, limited in features ...

Proprietary? Where?

I don't know much about Novell's offerings, but all of Redhat's stuff is open source that I
know about...

Look:
https://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/csgfs/browse/rh-cs-en...

That's their offering. I didn't look through all the spec files for those packages, but I
looked through a half a dozen or so (magma, ccsd, GFS, etc) and they were all licensed GPL. On
top of that GFS is available from Debian also.. kernel modules and everything from 'Main'
Testing/Unstable.



Oh and BTW. The article is a bit misleading (or press release or whatever)
http://www.redhat.com/cluster_suite/
> Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform
> With the release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 Advanced Platform, Red Hat Cluster Suite and
Global File System are now included in the subscription offering.
> Red Hat Cluster Suite and Global File System are still available as layered offerings for
Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions 3 and 4.

Oracle is just matching upstream, that's all...

With free clustering for Unbreakable Linux, Oracle goes after Red Hat (SearchEnterpriseLinux)

Posted Mar 29, 2008 0:50 UTC (Sat) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] 

Oh.. 

I read your statement wrong. I thought were meaning 'clusterware from Redhat/Suse' was
proprietary, not 'Clusterware(tm) from Oracle' compared to Suse/Redhat like you meant it.

Sorry for the misunderstanding. My fault.

With free clustering for Unbreakable Linux, Oracle goes after Red Hat (SearchEnterpriseLinux)

Posted Mar 27, 2008 22:46 UTC (Thu) by ewan (guest, #5533) [Link] (1 responses)

RedHat, of course, don't charge more for clustering; they charge more for supporting a clustered system, and that seems fair enough, they're considerably more complicated. If you want to use RedHat's cluster suite for free you can do, because it's Free software and included in (at least) CentOS and Scientific Linux.

With free clustering for Unbreakable Linux, Oracle goes after Red Hat (SearchEnterpriseLinux)

Posted Mar 28, 2008 0:13 UTC (Fri) by spot (guest, #15640) [Link] 

It's even included on the ISOs with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.

With free clustering for Unbreakable Linux, Oracle goes after Red Hat (SearchEnterpriseLinux)

Posted Mar 28, 2008 9:45 UTC (Fri) by cjl7 (guest, #26116) [Link] 

Hmmm,

Red Hat doesn't charge for clustering if you use the "Advanced Plattform", nor do they charge
for GFS in the same packageing.

I don't know much about Clusterware, but a good cluster filesystem is needed to build other
then HA clusters.

But I don't think oracle want to be in the Operatingsystem market, they just want to ship
their database as a "black box" solution. Compared to the database and appserver income the
Linux income will never be anything but a sneeze to Oracle.

I believe that they will be giving away (or including in marketing lingo) all the basic stuff
to drive there database, i.e. os + services.

my 2 cents

//jonas

With free clustering for Unbreakable Linux, Oracle goes after Red Hat (SearchEnterpriseLinux)

Posted Mar 28, 2008 13:53 UTC (Fri) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

Them in addition to the many other distributions that are based on or borrow from Red Hat... (Suse, CentOS, Mandriva, etc.).

And actually, Oracle's Linux distro is based on RHEL by way of CentOS.

With free clustering for Unbreakable Linux, Oracle goes after Red Hat (SearchEnterpriseLinux)

Posted Mar 28, 2008 9:51 UTC (Fri) by OfirM (guest, #51309) [Link] 

AFAIK, Oracle is not supporting Red Hat Clusters.
It is providing free access to Oracle Clusterware for Red Hat users (used to be free only for
Oracle's Enterprise Linux users or those who paid for Oracle products).
Oracle Clusterware is a closed-source clusterware that runs on linux, unix, windows etc. This
is the clusterware bundled with Oracle's database active-active cluster ("RAC"). 
See the Oracle Clusterware homepage:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/database/cluste...

With free clustering for Unbreakable Linux, Oracle goes after Red Hat (SearchEnterpriseLinux)

Posted Mar 28, 2008 19:58 UTC (Fri) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] 

Seems it's not working out too well anyway

http://eclipsecon.greenmeetingsystems.com/attachments/dow... (page 10)

With free clustering for Unbreakable Linux, Oracle goes after Red Hat (SearchEnterpriseLinux)

Posted Mar 31, 2008 23:37 UTC (Mon) by dreadnought (guest, #27222) [Link] 

I wish Oracle could focus on thier core business. i.e. their database.  I haven't been
particularly happy in using thier crappy website or patching and now they are going to add
another out of band product to thier offerings?!!?!?!?!  I think anyone who hasn't worked with
their stuff and is touting Unbreakable Linux should be treated like the village idiot they
are.  But what do I know I only admin 10 production installs with development instances and
100+ Linux servers across 4 server farms.


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