Larry Ellison isn’t exactly a big fan of Red Hat Linux. As such, Oracle will now offer customers an indigenously developed variant of the OS known as the “Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.”
“There are issues with us maintaining 100 percent compatibility with Red Hat Linux,” Ellison explained during his keynote speech at Oracle Open World 2010 which was quoted by CRN.
“And we were having real problems with the Linux OS.”
According to Ellison, Red Hat’s technology is at least four years behind the industry and incorporates bug fixes and enhancements too slowly.
“That’s [obviously] a huge problem for us as we build these high-performance machines. We [simply just] cannot afford to be four years behind.”
Nevertheless, Ellison emphasized that Oracle remained committed to supporting Red Hat, which would be offered alongside the company’s Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel.
However, Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols of ComputerWorld opined that he was unimpressed by Ellison’s controversial claims.
“Funny, I thought Larry Ellison already had his own Linux – Unbreakable Linux – which Oracle introduced not quite four-years ago. Of course, Unbreakable Linux [is] Red Hat’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with an Oracle Linux logo pasted on the front.
“[Yes], Oracle claims its more than 75 percent faster, as shown by Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) performance tests; 200 percent faster at InfiniBand messaging; and is 137 percent faster at solid state disk access than a Red Hat Compatible Kernel.
“[But] I’m not impressed by Oracle’s claims. An expert can make any operating system look like the greatest thing since sliced bread and its rival look like a two-day old dead dog…[So], it will [certainly] take more than Oracle’s employees claiming [their] new Linux is great before I buy it.”
