Red Hat Enterprise Linux is now running on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), offering companies a greater choice of operating systems as they migrate mission-critical applications to the cloud and fuel their digital transformation.
The strategic collaboration announced yesterday expanded the partnership between Red Hat and Oracle with the multi-stage alliance. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is now certified on OCI’s flexible virtual machines that offer from one up to 80 CPU cores in single CPU increments, and from 1GB memory per CPU up to a total of 1024 GB, depending on the processor. Red Hat Enterprise Linux is initially supported on the most recent OCI virtual machine shapes using AMD, Intel and Arm processors.
Giving choice to customers
Certified configurations of OCI flexible virtual machines can now run Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and enterprises can also migrate existing workloads already running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on OCI with greater confidence. OCI flexible virtual machines can scale in increments as small as a single CPU to optimise price-performance and minimise wasted resources. Companies can also contact both Red Hat and Oracle support to help resolve potential issues, with an expanded transparent, joint support agreement.
“Customer choice, from hardware to cloud provider, is a crucial commitment for Red Hat, whether these organisations are running operations in their own data centres, on multiple public clouds or at the far edge."
Ashesh Badani, senior vice president and head of products at Red Hat
He added: “Our collaboration with Oracle to deliver full support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux on OCI further cements this commitment to choice by extending cloud deployment options for our customers, and laying the foundation to make additional Red Hat solutions available to customers digitally transforming on OCI.”
Red Hat Enterprise Linux forms the backbone of Red Hat’s hybrid cloud technology portfolio, which includes Red Hat OpenShift. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform and additional 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 Red Hat Enterprise Linux while still retaining the value of existing IT investments.
“A significant number of customers rely on both Red Hat and OCI to run their operations and require more choice for distributed cloud deployments than ever before. Deepening our collaboration in the future will see us support additional products and workloads on OCI so customers have more flexibility,” said Clay Magouyrk, executive vice president at OCI.
Meanwhile, the planning work has begun for Red Hat Enterprise Linux to be certified on OCI’s bare-metal servers, which can provide greater isolation and performance comparable to on-premises environments.
Accelerated cloud adoption
According to Gartner, worldwide public cloud services is expected to grow 18.5% this year as companies continue to accelerate cloud adoption. This drives the five-year compound annual growth rate of 19.6%.
Currently, 90% of Fortune 500 companies rely on Red Hat and Oracle solutions. For many of them, Red Hat Enterprise Linux serves as their operating system foundation and OCI offers them high-performing, mission-critical cloud services, to power digital-forward operations.
Now these organisations are able to standardise their cloud operations with Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on OCI, which enables customers to gain a common platform that stretches from their data centre to the OCI distributed cloud.
Industry players welcomed the expanded collaboration between Red Hat and OCI as it is expected to hasten enterprises’ cloud initiatives.
“A hybrid and multicloud mindset is becoming the new normal. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux available on OCI, our clients can now migrate newer applications to OCI without changing the underlying environment, helping to accelerate transformation initiatives, and ultimately realize value faster."
David Wood, global strategy lead at Accenture Cloud First
Robert Churchyard, global Oracle leader at IBM shared the same sentiment.
“Modernisation is critical in today’s hybrid, multicloud world—but clients need choice and flexibility to enable a truly meaningful transformation. The collaboration between Red Hat and Oracle is another example of bringing choice to clients and helping them accelerate their modernisation efforts," he said.
India-based OCI customer Indus Towers likewise expressed optimism in this strategic collaboration.
“We currently uses OCI extensively to support our decision support and analytics platform and to enjoy true scalability for our Oracle application and database environments," said Vinod Sivarama Krishnan, CIO, Indus Towers.
He added: "The welcome addition of Red Hat Enterprise Linux support on OCI opens the door for us to further migrate certain key application stacks and workloads to cloud without recompilation, thereby avoiding development and testing costs and risks. This new capability will enable Indus Towers to bring the advantages of OCI scalability and reliability to a larger subset of the Indus Towers’ application stack,”
