Oracle signs Symantec to ULN

Big trio

By Gavin Clarke in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Developer, 18th July 2007 09:04 GMT

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Oracle's Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN) has landed its third big partner since a launch nine months ago that had Wall St predicting Red Hat's impending death.

The market's number-one database vendor announced on Tuesday that Symantec has certified its datacenter software with Oracle's Enterprise Linux alternative to Red Hat. Symantec follows in the footsteps of EMC and Hitachi Data Systems.

Symantec has certified its Storage Foundation 5.0, Storage Foundation 5.0 for Oracle, Storage Foundation Cluster File System 5.0, Cluster Server 5.0, NetBackup 6.0 Client, and Veritas i3. Veritas' Storage Foundation Cluster File System was also certified with Oracle Real Application Clusters on Oracle Enterprise Linux, Red Hat, and SuSE.

Oracle said the move followed growing customer demand for ULN, although we've yet to see any important customer announcements emerge since a high-profile launch presided over by chief executive Larry Ellison last October. Certification is likely to open the door to Symantec's enterprise customer base for ULN.

ULN's threat to Red Hat was always long-term, and since October's launch, it has been pulling the partners in that could tempt customers into running their systems based on service quality rather than purely price, as analysts expected.

Oracle has been working on vendor certification with its Linux network since launch. Ahead of Symantec, also a Red Hat enterprise partner, EMC got certified in April, following Hitachi Data Systems, 170 Systems, AppWorx, Egenera, Emulex, QLogic, and Synoran. ®

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