Feature

Cat among the penguins

Oracle’s announcement that it will distribute its variant of Linux, a free clone of Red Hat, and that the company will offer support to Red Hat customers for less than half of what Red Hat charges put a cat among the penguins. Then Microsoft and Novell announced an alliance to ensure the interoperability of Windows Server and Linux. On top of all this, Sun has thrown its hat into the ring with Open Solaris. These developments threaten to fragment an already chaotic environment. By Dominic K

Oracle has announced a forking of Red Hat’s operating system and has also undercut the latter’s service and support pricing model. At the same time, Microsoft has decided to support Novell’s SuSE environment. Both these announcements are likely to derail Red Hat’s strong hold on the Linux OS market share and at the same time they might well advance the case of OpenSolaris.

"Oracle’s move to support Linux and our alliance with Microsoft are further proof points that the IT industry has accepted Linux as a critical part of the enterprise" - Sandeep Menon Novell Linux Practice Head West Asia

Even before the Oracle announcement and the Microsoft-Novell alliance, Linux has already begun moving from edge networks into the enterprise data centre running mission-critical applications.

Sandeep Menon, Novell Linux Practice Head West Asia says, “Oracle’s move to support Linux and our alliance with Microsoft are further proof points that the IT industry has accepted Linux as a critical part of the enterprise.” The big boys in IT have accepted the fact that no single vendor can be the sole solution provider to the various challenges. Enterprises have mixed environments, they want to continue having mixed environments and be supported in such environments throughout.

Expect more Linux flavours

Linux is pushing the envelope in terms of sharing the IT community’s knowledge and experience, and working together towards building and maintaining efficient and cost-effective enterprise IT systems. Linux thus is still growing, evolving, and with the recent events it seems it is co-evolving.

Says Menon, “The Novell-Microsoft relationship will enable easy and powerful virtualisation of Linux on Windows and Windows on Linux. Novell will continue to promote Linux as the premier platform for core infrastructure and application services. This deal strengthens Novell’s commitment to the community through development projects as well as the continued promotion of Linux in the marketplace. We recognise the significant contribution open source developers have made to Linux and their reliance on the General Public License (GPL).”

Menon further informs that the relationship is focused on building a bridge between business and development models. Novell will continue to compete in a number of arenas, including the desktop, identity and security management, and resource management. At the product level, Windows and SuSE Linux Enterprise will continue to compete. However, the agreement is focused on making it easier for customers who want to run both Windows and Linux to do so. This is a common relationship for large businesses where partners compete in different areas.

HP continues to work closely with both Red Hat and Novell as key Linux partners for their joint customers. It is interesting to note that HP’s relationship with Red Hat, Novell and other open source and Linux partners, with the support of their products, remains unchanged with all the recent developments.

The OpenSolaris business is another development that proves single-solution, proprietary systems is not the way to go anymore. The OpenSolaris initiative works towards interoperability, turning to a community of users and developers with the knowledge and experience. In fact, the initiative turns Solaris into a more Linux-like OS. Solaris already has a strong user base, and the OpenSolaris initiative is a move that will strengthen the base further.

Oracle enters the fray

Oracle is best known for its flagship database though the company is also a leader in enterprise wide applications. It’s Unbreakable Linux is a support program to provide enterprises with global support for Linux. Having successfully tested and run its own applications in-house, it has decided to roll out its own flavour of Linux.

"With Oracle Unbreakable Linux, HP and Oracle customers have a broader choice of Linux distributions, products and services options to address their IT requirements" - Faisal Paul Country Manager-High Performance Computing and Linux business Hewlett-Packard, India Sales

The company has a long-standing history of supporting standards-based computing to lower the cost of IT infrastructure for customers. Oracle recognised the demand for enterprise quality Linux support and realising this opportunity to reduce IT infrastructure costs, Oracle decided to offer support for the Linux operating system extending to flavours such as Red Hat, Novell and Asianux. The support is regardless of whether or not the enterprise uses Oracle products.

Faisal Paul, country manager-High Performance Computing and Linux business, Hewlett-Packard, India Sales supports the recent move. He says, “HP supports Oracle’s plans for Oracle Unbreakable Linux V 2.0 and is pursuing a number of options with Oracle to ensure our ability to extend the benefits of the offering to customers.” HP supports multiple operating systems, including HP-UX, Windows, OpenVMS and Linux, on HP Integrity servers, and Windows and Linux on HP ProLiant servers. “Having a ‘choice’ in operating environments appeals to a broad set of customers who want the flexibility to choose solutions based on their particular business needs and demand,” he adds.

Linux is available under the GPL license that requires free distribution of the source code. A significant amount of code that is shipped by Red Hat as part of its distribution is actually created by developers outside of Red Hat. Oracle takes the source code that Red Hat makes available under GPL and has said that it will track the Red Hat distribution closely to ensure compatibility.

Oracle also plans to synchronise with every major Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) software release including the latest updates. If Red Hat does not include Oracle fixes in their update releases under such circumstances Oracle will include the additional fixes at the time of each major synchronisation with the current RHEL software release.

Paul says, “With Oracle Unbreakable Linux, HP and Oracle customers have a broader choice of Linux distributions, products and services options to address their IT requirements.” HP is the world’s largest Linux platform vendor and Oracle’s largest installed base systems vendor. HP will continue to certify, resell and globally support RHEL and Novell SUSE Linux, and integrate them into our supported HP open source middleware stacks.

Sun casts a shadow on Linux

"Sun’s support services are on average 35 percent cheaper than Red Hat. We are the only OS supplier to combine open-source technology and licensing with in-house expertise to provide predictable and reliable support" - Baba Sam Marketing Director Sun Microsystems

Sun has thrown its hat in the ring with its OpenSolaris. Will Sun’s OpenSolaris eat into Linux’s market and mindshare? Companies that are in the process of analysing and evaluating Red Hat or SuSE Linux will likely be concerned about potential business disruptions resulting from the recent announcements as well as the potential for increased risk associated with compatibility, support and intellectual property issues. Sun claims to mitigate these risks in multiple ways by providing legally guaranteed compatibility for both binary compatibility from release to release and source code compatibility from platform to platform.

Baba Sam, marketing director, Sun Microsystems, says, “We offer 24x7 enterprise-class support worldwide for Open Solaris. Sun’s support services are on average 35 percent cheaper than Red Hat and that Sun Microsystems is the only OS supplier to combine a full open-source technology and license with the in-house expertise to provide predictable and reliable service and support.” He adds unlike some open source OS vendors, Sun protects the open source community by providing a blanket patent grant for the Solaris technology with built-in patent protections for the community.

Sam says, “Solaris 10 is the product of over $500 million in R&D with a superior technology foundation including a well-defined roadmap with features such as Trusted Extensions and Xen hypervisor right around the corner.”

Solaris has volume adoption with over six million registered licenses downloaded on to x86 systems. Solaris is multi-platform, and is supported on more than seven-hundred x64 platforms.

Inside the Novell-Microsoft pact

Although the recent Novell- Microsoft pact has had an adverse impact on the latter’s relations with the open-source community to a certain extent, it will boost the confidence of companies running Windows to consider mixed Windows-Linux environments.

“More players in the Linux world are a boon for the end-users and enterprise customers. Linux users will only grow and Linux market penetration will get deeper. The Novell-Microsoft tie-up will develop confidence among Windows users to start using Linux as well. However survivors among the vendors will be the one who remain competitive, innovative and maintain the best support quality,” says Manoj Kumar Roy, country business leader- Linux, IBM India Whatever will be the outcome of Microsoft-Novell pact, Oracle and Red Hat, the market is expected to see consolidation in the Linux market, which is good for the industry as business who are planning to run Linux inside their data centre or core applications are expected to gain and can bargain the best.