Oracle Wants to Hold Your Linux-Leery Hand

Oracle is catering to the Linux-leery, announcing June 12 the Oracle Validated Configuration program to provide pre-tested 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, Hewlett-Packard, 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.

Read more here about Oracle’s efforts in the database market.

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 mission-critical setups will need to go live,” he said.

Read the full story on eWEEK.com: Oracle Wants to Hold Your Linux-Leery Hand