UPDATED 07:35 EDT / MAY 14 2014

Oracle launches OpenStack missile at Red Hat’s cloud party

origin_13602256573Oracle has just taken a major shot across the bow of Red Hat, announcing a preview of its own OpenStack build designed to run atop Oracle Linux and Oracle VM Server. This comes following its integration of its Solaris platform with the open-source cloud framework at the end of last month.

For now, Oracle’s OpenStack distro is still a ‘technology preview’, available to install over current versions of Oracle Linux and also its Oracle VM 3.33 beta release. Users who do so will be able to leverage the open-source cloud software, something that gives them additional choices and interoperability while building on Oracle Linux and Oracle VM’s performance, scalability, efficiency and security. The packages that make up the various OpenStack services can now be downloaded from the YUM repository, said Oracle.

This represents the first time Oracle has come up with its own binaries for OpenStack, having previously limited itself to funding the open-source project only. It’s not immediately clear what kind of work has gone into integrating OpenStack with its own Linux distro, but the move seems to be targeted at Red Hat, which has been making lots of loud noises about open-source software during this week’s OpenStack Summit.

Oracle and Red Hat haven’t exactly been the best of friends since the former announced its own Linux distro back in 2006. That’s because Oracle Linux is more or less a cloned version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, built off of Red Hat’s code. So similar are the two platforms that Oracle even admits its own patches could be applied to a Red Hat Enterprise server and vice versa with zero hiccups.

Meanwhile, Oracle VM bears a striking resemblance to the open-source Xen hypervisor, with just an Oracle Linux kernel plus a few more tweaks being the only real differences.

But copycat or not, Oracle Linux does give its customers the advantage of consolidating their entire software stack – from apps to OS kernel – in one place, so to speak. Now with its new OpenStack variant, Oracle is now supporting open-source clouds, guest operating systems and the hypervisor.

Chris Kawalek, Oracle’s Product Director, wrote in a blog post that the company is committed to working with the OpenStack community and helping it advance towards the enterprise application space.

“As OpenStack matures and evolves it provides a solution which can meet the growing need for standardisation in the IT infrastructure. With the wider adoption of OpenStack, customers are looking to leverage it to a broader set of applications including enterprise applications,” wrote Kawalek.

Those who want to give Oracle’s OpenStack preview a try can do so with the aid of the following get-started guide. The company hasn’t said when we can expect a full release of its OpenStack build, but it did say the software will be supported alongside Oracle Linux and Oracle VM at no extra cost.

photo credit: DVIDSHUB via photopin cc

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