I found this rather interesting story on Digg about Ubuntu trying to get certified for Oracle. On the surface it seems like a good Idea, but I am going to tell you why their resources are better spent elsewhere.
The article states that "Certification for third-party applications such as Oracle's database is
considered critical for the continued growth of Canonical's support services." I believe that's a very accurate statement. I know that there are a lot of fans of Ubuntu on the desktop, and you can count me as one of them. However, for Canonical to be sustainable corporation in the long run they need to make a big push into the data center.
The only way to get there is by gaining a good reputation among UNIX/Linux System Administrators, Database Administrators, and CIOs. The crux being that if your OS and Hardware is not certified to run Oracle or any other third party software for that matter you are not going to be able to get support to support. I realize that Oracle support is not always what it should be, but there are many instances when Oracle can come up with a workaround or a patch that can make the difference between having significant re-occurring downtime or having a stable platform that meets your uptime/SLA (Service Level Agreement) requirements.
While getting certified on Oracle will go a ways toward getting Ubuntu into large data centers, it's not the end game. Part of the difficulty is that Ubuntu is only certified on certain Sun hardware. Most companies who buy Sun servers buy them to run Sun Solaris (Sun's version of UNIX), not Ubuntu. So it's pretty easy to see that it's an uphill battle. There are not a whole lot of shops buying commodity hardware to run Linux. The advantage of Linux is that it can offer something close to the stability of UNIX running on commodity iron while saving money by running on less expensive X86 servers. So it seems to me that Ubuntu should concentrate more resources on getting certified on Dell and HP X86 servers. Once Ubuntu is certified on these machines all the third party software certifications will fall into place.
Well there you have it my two cents. Let me know what you think.
The article states that "Certification for third-party applications such as Oracle's database is
considered critical for the continued growth of Canonical's support services." I believe that's a very accurate statement. I know that there are a lot of fans of Ubuntu on the desktop, and you can count me as one of them. However, for Canonical to be sustainable corporation in the long run they need to make a big push into the data center.
The only way to get there is by gaining a good reputation among UNIX/Linux System Administrators, Database Administrators, and CIOs. The crux being that if your OS and Hardware is not certified to run Oracle or any other third party software for that matter you are not going to be able to get support to support. I realize that Oracle support is not always what it should be, but there are many instances when Oracle can come up with a workaround or a patch that can make the difference between having significant re-occurring downtime or having a stable platform that meets your uptime/SLA (Service Level Agreement) requirements.
While getting certified on Oracle will go a ways toward getting Ubuntu into large data centers, it's not the end game. Part of the difficulty is that Ubuntu is only certified on certain Sun hardware. Most companies who buy Sun servers buy them to run Sun Solaris (Sun's version of UNIX), not Ubuntu. So it's pretty easy to see that it's an uphill battle. There are not a whole lot of shops buying commodity hardware to run Linux. The advantage of Linux is that it can offer something close to the stability of UNIX running on commodity iron while saving money by running on less expensive X86 servers. So it seems to me that Ubuntu should concentrate more resources on getting certified on Dell and HP X86 servers. Once Ubuntu is certified on these machines all the third party software certifications will fall into place.
Well there you have it my two cents. Let me know what you think.
Powered by ScribeFire.
0 comments:
Post a Comment