With free clustering for Unbreakable Linux, Oracle goes after Red Hat (SearchEnterpriseLinux) [LWN.net]

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

Posted Mar 27, 2008 22:26 UTC (Thu) by marduk (guest, #3831)
In reply to: With free clustering for Unbreakable Linux, Oracle goes after Red Hat (SearchEnterpriseLinux) by Los__D
Parent article: With free clustering for Unbreakable Linux, Oracle goes after Red Hat (SearchEnterpriseLinux)

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.

to post comments

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.