News

Oracle adds support for UnitedLinux

• By John K. Waters
• March 19, 2003

Oracle Corp. furthered its love affair with Linux at last week's CeBIT conference in Hannover, Germany, with the signing of a partnership with UnitedLinux (UL) that will extend its "unbreakable" program to enterprise Linux installations on that platform. The two companies first disclosed the partnership at the National Manufacturing Week trade show in Chicago.

The Redwood Shores, Calif.-based database maker said it can now provide 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 UnitedLinux to create a "joint escalation team" that can service the entire Oracle stack running on UL products. The company said the support service would 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.

UnitedLinux is a consortium of four second-tier players that teamed up to compete more effectively with leading Linux OS provider Red Hat. Its founding members -- Connectiva S.A., The SCO Group, SuSE Linux AG and Turbolinux -- are charged with providing specific added value components on top of a common Linux engine, UnitedLinux 1.0. In February 2003, UnitedLinux completed certification of UnitedLinux Version 1.0 with both Oracle9i Database and its database clustering technology, Oracle9i Real Application Clusters.

Oracle launched its Unbreakable Linux program last summer, when it partnered with Red Hat.

"Collaborating with Oracle extends the global reach that UnitedLinux has established via our founding members," said Paula Hunter, general manager at UnitedLinux. The consortium expects the Oracle pact to extend the global reach of the operating system by making it attractive to Oracle DBMS users.

Customers who have deployed Oracle products on UnitedLinux-certified hardware platforms can now receive technical support directly from Oracle Support Services, according to Oracle officials. Oracle intends to identify technical support issues and fix them in collaboration with UnitedLinux, providing customers with a single point of contact. Oracle and UnitedLinux will collaborate to integrate required fixes/patches in future maintenance releases of UnitedLinux, officials said.