A decade ago, the thought of running business applications on any form of Linux was a concept that few enterprises took seriously. Fast forward to today and not only do we see applications running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), we see organizations actively seeking to move more of their business-critical applications from other platforms such as UNIX to RHEL. It is to help accelerate that process that Symantec and Red Hat today announced a number of jointly supported solutions make that transition as seamless as possible and then properly support it once it is in place
The topic of what UNIX will look like and even which UNIX platforms will survive long term has become a matter of increasing debate in the last few months and years. As RHEL delivers more enterprise features and enterprises look to lower their infrastructure costs, the transition from UNIX to RHEL in enterprise shops may become more than sensible. It may be inevitable.
But getting from UNIX to RHEL is not as simple as buying some x86 servers, plugging them in, installing RHEL and then bringing up business-critical applications on RHEL. Enterprise may be looking to cut IT costs out of their budget, but in the same breathe they do not want to do that in such a way that it puts these applications in harm’s way during the migration or are then unable to support it or guarantee the same levels of service once the application is running on RHEL.
While RHEL has largely become the Linux OS of choice for enterprise shops to host their business-critical applications (Symantec says that a predominant of their customers already use RHEL), the deepening alliance between Red Hat and Symantec helps to ensure that business-critical applications, databases and infrastructure stay up and running with Symantec bringing to the table for the additional high availability, disaster recovery and storage infrastructure performance for RHEL environments.
Symantec is not new to the Linux space and has worked with Red Hat for a number of years, so it only natural that enterprises want Symantec’s Storage Foundation suite to accompany RHEL’s introduction into their environment for RHEL’s platform and cost savings along with Storage Foundation’s high availability and disaster recovery features.
Along with helping to automate wide-area disaster recovery and improving the availability of storage infrastructure, another area where Symantec and Red Hat are seeing success by using their solutions jointly is to facilitate moving single instance Oracle databases to the x86 platform. Here the return value to customers may grow two, three or even four fold.
- Cost Reductions. Organizations get the cost reductions that come from adopting RHEL as the OS platform to host Oracle that enables them to use an x86 server platform as opposed to more expensive Oracle RAC systems.
- New Failover and Disaster Recovery Capabilities. By installing Veritas Storage Foundation Cluster File System and Veritas Cluster Server on the new server/s, customers now get additional scalability, failover and recovery options that they may have not had when hosting the Oracle database on UNIX, or will get the same exceptional levels of availability in case they were previously running Symantec’s Storage Foundation Suite on UNIX. Using Cluster Server, should the underlying hardware fail, the Oracle database is failed over to another server – locally or remote, physical or virtual – in less than a minute.
- Certified by Oracle. Symantec’s Veritas Storage Foundation Cluster File System is the ONLY file system certified with Oracle. This gives organizations the confidence that once they host their Oracle database on RHEL, it is a configuration that will be supported should problems ever arise (and problems always seem to eventually arise so this is critical.
- Improved Performance. Symantec’s Veritas Storage Foundation and Veritas Storage Foundation Cluster File System allow shared storage configurations which facilitates faster failovers and while serving to provide a performance boost. As data is written and, depending on policies set, Symantec’s automatic storage tiering feature has insight into the underlying storage and can place data on the most appropriate tiers of storage for optimal performance.
Granted, organizations need to have in place enterprise storage systems, but let’s face it, enterprises are more likely than not attaching RHEL systems with Oracle databases to enterprise storage infrastructure. Symantec’s Storage Foundation solution additionally gives organizations the opportunity to capitalize and optimize their existing storage hardware investment by supporting storage arrays from multiple vendors.
Enterprise organizations are looking to cut costs and use their existing infrastructures more wisely but they also have no tolerance for putting business-critical applications at risk. This is why they are looking to take advantage of the best of what new operating systems and platforms have to offer, while leveraging the best of the software and hardware they already own.
By Red Hat and Symantec deepening their alliance and working more closely to deliver supported solutions that ensure high availability (HA), disaster recovery (DR) and better performance, it is no wonder that RHEL is rapidly becoming the de facto Linux platform of choice in enterprise shops. RHEL delivers the OS on the lower cost hardware platform they need to cost-justify the move while Symantec brings in the proven HA and DR features that enterprises want and need so they can rest easy at night once the transition is complete.