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Oracle reaffirms love for Linux

Carl Weinschenk Tech Republic

Published: 11 Sep 2003 12:25 BST

Upgrades on the horizon
To date, Oracle has made Linux "database-grade," Shimp said. The company also has greatly upgraded its security and is working to provide the uptime levels necessary for operation in the telecommunications sector. "That’s a significant ongoing effort," Shimp said.

Regarding security, Shimp said Oracle has helped Red Hat come close to achieving Evaluation Assurance Level 2 (EAL2) and is defining a path to EAL4, which is "extremely high level." Linux security, he said, is "very good, but not excellent." The expectation is that excellence in Linux security will be reached in a couple of years. Shimp said that the company runs Oracle.com, its financial systems, its demonstration systems, and its online retrieval systems on Linux. "We’ve taken this very, very seriously at Oracle," he said.

The analysts agree
While neither attended Shimp’s speech, two analysts generally verified a high level of involvement by Oracle with Linux. For one thing, Oracle brings the kind of security only big players can provide. "IDC’s survey-based research has repeatedly shown that vendor support for both applications and application development and deployment tools has been a concern of IT decision-makers about deploying Linux-based solutions," wrote Dan Kusnetzky, IDC’s vice president for system software research, in an email. "Oracle’s announcements have tended to remove some of those concerns."

Ted Schadler, Forrester’s principal analyst for software, was even more emphatic. "Oracle has been a huge force in Linux," he wrote. "Oracle has been investing in Linux since 1998 and now offers a great database on Linux clusters, Oracle9iRAC. This clustering technology means that Linux-on-Intel can now scale to the enterprise."

The future's with the grid
Linux will play a key role in any interrelated technology Oracle is embracing. Grid, as the name implies, refers to an electrical-style infrastructure in which computing power can be delegated between servers and other computers in an as-needed fashion. So, for instance, servers in the human resources department that are essentially unused at 3:00 a.m. can be used by the inventory department, which often goes full throttle at such times. Indeed, some grid scenarios can employ unused computing power halfway across the globe -- a server in Tokyo can be used to help crunch numbers in New York City, or vice versa, depending on the time. "All in our industry are struggling to find a better model for grid computing," Shimp said. "Oracle has a huge engineering effort to develop the bulk of what we need to do."