The News: Red Hat, a provider of open source solutions, and Oracle announced a multi-stage alliance to offer customers a greater choice of operating systems to run on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). Red Hat Enterprise Linux is now certified on OCI’s virtual machines (VMs) that offer from one 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 VM shapes using AMD, Intel, and Arm processors. Read the Oracle Press Release here.
Red Hat and Oracle Strengthen Relationship: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Now Runs on OCI
Analyst Take: Red Hat Enterprise Linux can now run on certified configurations of OCI flexible virtual machines (VMs), also allowing customers to migrate existing workloads running on RHEL to RHEL on OCI with increased confidence. The strategic collaboration starts with RHEL running on OCI as a supported operating system, aimed at improving the experience for organizations that rely on both OCI and RHEL, especially as their Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) demands expand. Plus, the global systems integration partners of both companies are on board for the multi-stage alliance.
Through an expanded transparent, joint support agreement, customers can reach out to both Red Hat and Oracle support to address any service issues. For clarification, Leo Leung, Oracle VP Products and Strategy, shared that the enhanced joint offering is not a managed service akin to AWS-type offerings. As such, I view the Red Hat/OCI approach as giving customers more flexibility in administering and optimizing their Enterprise Linux workloads and mission-critical applications across their hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
According to Oracle, the customer demand for this move was broad and universal and not limited to specific verticals and regions. This makes sense since already 90% of Fortune 500 companies use Red Hat and Oracle solutions with many using RHEL servers as their operating system foundation and OCI provides flexible, cost-competitive capacity to fit any workload requirement, encompassing adaptable VMs, high-performance bare metal servers, lightweight containers, and serverless computing across Oracle’s public cloud, including hybrid implementations, Oracle Alloy, and Dedicated Regions.
OCI VMs are designed to scale in increments as small as a single CPU to optimize price-performance and minimize resource waste. I see this as a key differentiator against the major public cloud providers that do not offer single CPU scaling increments, which can oblige customers to over-subscribe the cores used in supporting workloads.
From my view, RHEL has an extensive track record at delivering the consistent operating foundation needed for enterprise hybrid cloud deployments and IT modernization. The platform enables organizations to deploy and run applications anywhere, including throughout private and public cloud as well as physical and virtual environments. The augmentation of the OCI alliance further validates the ecosystem-wide reliability and customer trust in RHEL.
For next steps, I anticipate that Red Hat and Oracle will provide more insight on how the alliance can leverage Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform assets to advance joint customer cloud-native stack deployments.
Key Takeaways: Red Hat Enterprise Linux Runs on OCI
Through the augmentation of their ongoing collaboration, I expect that the joint customers of Red Hat and Oracle can advance their future-forward computing journeys on RHEL while also protecting their existing IT investments. Now Red Hat and Oracle can broaden their influence across the cloud ecosystem by validating that customers value greater choice throughout their distributed cloud implementations.
Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum Research as a whole.
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Author Information
Ron is an experienced, customer-focused research expert and analyst, with over 20 years of experience in the digital and IT transformation markets, working with businesses to drive consistent revenue and sales growth.
Ron holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from University of Nevada — Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts in political science/government from William and Mary.
