After years of delivering bug fixes and patches to Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux, Oracle finally decided to get into the Linux game when it launched Oracle Linux at the Oracle OpenWorld in 2006.  Close to ten years later, Oracle and its commitment to Linux is still going strong.

The corporation counts more than 8,000 companies, including some of the world’s biggest firms and conglomerates, as customers.

Oracle is uniquely positioned to deliver some benefits to its Oracle Lixnux customers.  This is best illustrated when compared to Red Hat.

1. Red Hat does not take time to validate its Linux releases with Oracle products.  On the other hand, Oracle spends a lot of time, money and effort, trying to find bugs and vulnerabilities that Red Hat introduces into Linux.
2. Oracle takes note of community enhancements and quickly introduces good ones into the Unbreakable Linux Kernel.  Red Hat is slow in adopting community tweaks and the current Linux distribution from Red Hat is based on a mainline version that is already four years old.
3. If you are using Red Hat, Oracle’s hands are tied.  Much of the company’s innovations are related to the mainline, so if you want to make use of Oracle’s improvements on your Red Hat system, you would need to wait on Red Hat or back port them to the old kernel.  This means a considerable amount of time, money and effort spent on something that you should get right out of the box with Oracle Linux.

But more than these, it is the company’s Oracle Linux strategy that you should be aware of.  What is the company’s Linux strategy?

Bring customers the latest innovations in Linux.

Oracle makes its own contributions to the community and tracks the mainline closely.  It deploys the best practices with Oracle Linux, testing the full stack with real inputs and workloads.  This way, Oracle can give its customers the most modern, most reliable and best-performing Linux distribution available in the market.

Give customers the only updates that involve no downtime.

When you update your Linux distributions from other providers, it is inevitable that you would power down your systems in order to upgrade it.  Not so when you use Oracle Linux.  With Ksplice, you get no disruptions to your operations even when you need to install major kernel updates.  You do not even have to stop your applications.  Only Oracle has this capability and it is available to customers who avail of Premier Support.

Keep Oracle Linux modern, fast and reliable.

When you use Oracle Linux, you are sure that you are hitting and surpassing all the performance benchmarks that matter.  It is based on the mainline Linux kernel, it uses Btrfs and is optimized for SSDs.  You also get the best in class data integrity, hardware fault troubleshooting and management.  Plus, if you are using Oracle software, Oracle Linux is fully tested and certified for it.

Keep costs low.

Oracle brings you enterprise-quality Linux that is free to download and gives low cost support.

You get comprehensive legal indemnification.

In short, Oracle is committed to giving customers the most reliable, modern and fast Linux distribution that would do away with downtimes and other headaches.  Convinced?  Call Four Cornerstone today and find out how you could switch from other Linux distributions to Oracle Linux.

Photo courtesy of Sean MacEntee.