Red Hat 3 Feels at Home in Oracle’s Database

Oracle continued its commitment to Linux and one of the
open-source operating system’s leading purveyors when it announced
that its database has been optimized for Red Hat’s latest platform, Enterprise Linux 3.

Longtime partners Red Hat and Oracle worked together to boost the
scalability and performance of its recently-unveiled Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 for Oracle environments,
adding more than 50 new enhancements to help run applications more
efficiently.

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 will provide improved multi-threading, virtual memory systems and several input/output improvements, such as
increased address space of the kernel from 1 GB to almosy 4 GB, which Oracle
said will have a great impact on the number of users that large roll-outs
can handle. Oracle anticipates its customers will see up to 64 GB of memory,
more than double that of Red Hat Enterprise Linux AS 2.1 running Oracle.

The news is important for Redwood Shores, Calif.’s Oracle, which has big
plans for Linux for its up and coming 10G database and application server.
Oracle has long hawked Linux as the cost-effective alternative to Windows
and Unix operating environments, noting that it can scale to
enterprise-heavy loads while running on relatively inexpensive hardware.

“Oracle has displayed a deep commitment to Linux by establishing a strategic
partnership with Red Hat to collaborate in the definition of features to
enhance Oracle deployments,” said Brian Stevens, vice president, Operating
System Development at Red Hat. “Customers running Oracle solutions on Red
Hat Enterprise Linux 3 will experience faster performance and better
reliability and scalability, at a value unachievable with proprietary Unix.”

The news comes in the middle of LinuxWorld Germany, where several Linux
promoters are showing their wares and unveiling partnerships.

The Oracle and
Red Hat reaffirmation also comes against a backdrop of uncertainty for the
Linux operating system, as a battle over source code is being waged between
SCO and many concerns in the industry, including IBM and
Red
Hat.

But even as IBM, Red Hat and others weather the legal storm from SCO,
companies such as Oracle and Veritas are continuing in their support for the
platform.

Oracle supports Linux across its entire software line.
Monday SuSE Linux agreed
to work with Veritas to engineer and sell the storage software company’s
products, including Veritas’ File System, Volume Manager and Cluster Server
in 2004.

In related news, the next major upgrade to the Linux kernel, Version 2.6, was released by the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) over the weekend. Linux founder Linus Torvalds said “test9” is now ready for enterprise testing.

The OSDL asked Linux customers, ISVs and leading systems providers to test, validate and enhance the latest version ahead of the final release of the production code.