Oracle , which pledged
its support for Red Hat with its Unbreakable Linux
initiative in June, extended that commitment to UnitedLinux Thursday.
Oracle said it will provide customers with enterprise-level technical
support for the operating systems powered by UnitedLinux, in addition to
support for the Oracle products. The company said it is working closely
with founding members Connectiva, The SCO Group, SuSE Linux and TurboLinux
to create a joint escalation team that can service the entire Oracle stack
running on UnitedLinux products.
The company said the support service will be open to customers who have an
Oracle support contract for Oracle products and maintain an operating
system support contract with any of the four UnitedLinux founding members.
“Oracle is not getting into the distribution business,” said Dave Dargo, vice president, Linux Program Office, at Oracle. “We expect our customers to maintain a business relationship with both Oracle and UnitedLinux.”
He added, “There will be no additional charge or contractual obligation on the part of the customers to get this additional level of support.”
In addition to support, the agreement encompasses a deeper technical relationship between Oracle and the UnitedLinux developer team. The two will work together to identify areas that are important to improve Linux for enterprise-class deployments.
“With concurrent certification of our members’ offerings and integrated
global support, we expect this program will help ensure customer confidence
in deploying Oracle solutions powered by UnitedLinux,” said Paula Hunter,
general manager of UnitedLinux. “Customers who have deployed Oracle
products on our hardware platforms that are certified with UnitedLinux will
be able to receive technical support directly from Oracle Support Services,
leading to faster resolution of critical issues. Oracle intends to identify
technical support issues and fix them in collaboration with UnitedLinux,
providing customers a single point of contact. Customers can benefit from
joint engineering efforts as Oracle and UnitedLinux collaborate to
integrate required fixes/patches in future maintenance releases of
UnitedLinux.”
UnitedLinux already completed certification of UnitedLinux 1.0 with both
Oracle9i Database and the Oracle9i Real Application Clusters database
clustering technology in February.
The support agreement underscores Oracle’s increasing commitment to the
Linux platform. In addition to the UnitedLinux certification, Oracle also
continued to back Red Hat’s play in February when it submitted the Red Hat Linux Advanced Server for a Common Criteria (ISO 15408)
evaluation at Evaluation Assurance Level (EAL) 2.
The move was intended to help security-conscious customers in both the
public and private sector to procure an evaluated Linux platform and run
their enterprise software on a secure Linux operating system.
