News

Red Hat-Oracle Collaboration Brings Red Hat Enterprise Linux to OCI

• By John K. Waters
• February 1, 2023

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) is now certified to run on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), Oracle's cloud services platform, as a supported operating system, the two companies announced recently. The move is part of a multi-stage alliance to offer customers a greater choice of operating systems to run on OCI, they said.

Red Hat, a subsidiary of IBM, is one of the world’s leading providers of open-source solutions. RHEL is a commercial open-source Linux distribution developed by the company for the commercial market.

RHEL serves as the backbone of Red Hat’s hybrid cloud technology portfolio, which includes Red Hat OpenShift, the company's Kubernetes container platform, and the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, its enterprise IT automation solution, as well as technologies to support the modern cloud-native stack.

With this collaboration, joint customers of Red Hat and Oracle can now create a foundation for "future-forward computing deployments" on RHEL, explained Leo Leung, Vice President of OCI and Oracle Technology at Oracle, while still retaining the value of existing IT investments.

"What this means is that Red Hat customers can bring the standard Red Hat Enterprise Linux that's supported by Red Hat onto OCI," Leung told ADTmag. "We're starting with what we call flexible virtual machines. Our VMs let customers select exactly how many cores and exactly how much memory they want to use, unlike the standard T-shirt-size kind of approach. Our goal is to help customers optimize exactly the amount of resources they want for exactly how much they want to pay."

Oracle's "distributed class strategy," which designates 41 public cloud regions, some of which are government-focused, is also supported for RHEL, Leung explained. OCI can be deployed on customers' premises, he said, running inside their data centers or collocated, with Oracle bringing the full hardware/software stack, as they're doing for Vodafone today.

"All those customers will also be able to take advantage of Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on OCI," Leung said. "We think those are unique things the two companies can offer together."

An estimated 90% of the Fortune 500 currently rely on Red Hat and Oracle solutions, Leung pointed out. For many of these companies, RHEL serves as their operating system foundation, with OCI offering them high-performing, mission-critical cloud services, to power digital-forward operations.

Planning has begun to certify RHEL on OCI’s bare-metal servers, Leung said, which would provide greater isolation and performance comparable to on-premises environments.