Oracle Linux Gains Key Certification

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Oracle’s Linux offerings are gaining new support today.

The support comes in the form of a string of certifications from Symantec’s (Quote) Veritas data center software products as well as new support for running
Veritas Storage Foundation Cluster File System with Oracle Real Application
Clusters on Oracle Enterprise Linux.

All told, Oracle (Quote) is hailing the new certifications as proof positive that
its Linux support offering is working.

“The Oracle Unbreakable Linux support program is continuing to gain traction
with end users and we are well on our way to building a solid business
around Linux support at Oracle,” Monica Kumar, senior director of open
source product marketing at Oracle, told internetnews.com.

The
Oracle Unbreakable Linux support program first rolled out in October of
2006, as an effort from Oracle to provide support for Red Hat Enterprise
Linux (RHEL) customers. Oracle also offers its own Oracle Enterprise Linux
which is essentially RHEL, without the Red Hat trademarks included (logo,
name etc.).

The new Veritas certifications for Oracle’s Linux include: Veritas Storage
Foundation 5.0; Veritas Storage Foundation for Oracle 5.0; Veritas Storage
Foundation Cluster File System 5.0; Veritas Cluster Server 5.0, Veritas
NetBackup 6.0 Client and Veritas i3

“This is an important milestone for Symantec data center customer as they
now have access to support through this program and they can move to Oracle
Linux support,” Kumar said. “We expect to see an uptake of Symantec
customers as a result of this certification and we are hoping that this
certification will allow users to realize the potential of Linux while
lowering cost by moving to Oracle Linux.”

Though Kumar expects growth as a result of the certification she admitted
that as of today there is no joint effort by Symantec or Oracle to resell
each others solutions.

Since day one of Oracle Linux, Oracle has claimed that their support
offering is supposed to be binary compatible with what Red Hat offers.

“If the solution is already certified with Red Hat they don’t have to do
anything,” Kumar noted. “We provide all the documentation to show why.”

With Symantec however, Kumar noted that they wanted to go through their own
testing to validate the full solution. According to Kumar, Symantec found
similar code and that the solution all works well.

When Oracle first announced its Linux support, they were talking about
support for RHEL 4, now they are also talking about RHEL 5 which was
released earlier this year.

Kumar noted that Oracle provided support for RHEL 5 from day 1 of its
release and made its own Oracle Enterprise Linux 5 (based on RHEL 5)
available in mid June after some
additional testing.

“We did end up fixing a few bugs and making those fixes available to
everybody publicly including Red Hat,” Kumar said.

In addition to having Symantec certify its solutions for Oracle Linux,
Oracle also helped Symantec to certify Veritas Storage Foundation Cluster
File System with Oracle Real Application Clusters on Oracle Enterprise
Linux, Red Hat and SUSE.

Veritas Storage Foundation Cluster File System is actually a competitive
offering to the Oracle OCFS2 clustered file system which is open source and
has been part of the mainline Linux kernel since the 2.6.16 release
in March of 2006. Kumar noted that the new Veritas file system support
on Linux is a matter of choice for users. She noted that there are users
that invested in the Veritas file system and that by certifying for Linux
it allows them to carry forward to Linux.

“For us it’s about expanding the Linux market,” Kumar said. “We’re really
focused on increasing the footprint of the Oracle support program, the
user base and ultimately expanding the Linux market for everyone not just
Oracle.”

This article was first published on InternetNews.com.