Red Hat Enterprise Linux now on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
Red Hat, the provider of open source solutions, and Oracle has announced a multi-stage alliance to offer customers a greater choice of operating systems to run on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). The strategic collaboration starts with Red Hat Enterprise Linux running on OCI as a supported operating system, improving the experience for organisations that rely on both OCI and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to fuel digital transformation and migration of mission-critical applications to the cloud.
Gartner's Forecast: Public Cloud Services, Worldwide, 2020-2026, 4Q22 Update, states that "worldwide, public cloud services are forecast to grow 18.5% in 2023" while "organisations continue accelerating cloud adoption, which is driving a five-year compound annual growth rate of 19.6%." This growth indicates a need for broad support of customer choice, both in terms of the cloud provider and the operating system underpinning cloud environments.
Ninety percent of the Fortune 500 currently rely on Red Hat and Oracle solutions. For many of these companies, Red Hat Enterprise Linux serves as their operating system foundation, and OCI offers high-performing, mission-critical cloud services to power digital-forward operations. Now, these organisations can 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.
With this strategic collaboration, certified configurations of OCI flexible virtual machines can now run Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Customers can also migrate existing workloads already running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux to Red Hat Enterprise Linux on OCI more confidently. In addition, OCI flexible virtual machines can scale as small as a single CPU in increments to optimise price performance and minimise wasted resources. With an expanded transparent, joint support agreement, customers can also contact both Red Hat and Oracle support to help resolve potential issues.
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 other 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 retaining the value of existing IT investments.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux is now certified on OCI's flexible virtual machines that offer up to 80 CPU cores in single CPU increments and from 1GB memory per CPU up to 1024GB, 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.
Meanwhile, planning work has begun for Red Hat Enterprise Linux to be certified on OCI's bare-metal servers, which can provide more excellent isolation and performance comparable to on-premises environments.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux provides a flexible and stable foundation to support hybrid cloud innovation. Applications and critical workloads can be built, deployed and managed faster and more efficiently with greater consistency across physical, virtual, private, public cloud and edge deployments. The platform provides for building security and compliance capabilities into infrastructure at development and a path to more easily maintaining stability throughout the production life cycle. IT organisations can operate with greater confidence and trust using a platform that empowers innovation and increases operational efficiency within their organisation—no matter where they choose to run.
OCI's distributed cloud offers customers the benefits of the cloud with greater control over data residency, locality and authority, even across multiple clouds.
"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. 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," says Ashesh Badani, Senior Vice President and Head of Products, Red Hat.
"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. Starting today, customers can deploy Red Hat Enterprise Linux on OCI and receive full support for these certified configurations from both Red Hat and Oracle. Deepening our collaboration in the future will see us support additional products and workloads on OCI so customers have more flexibility," adds Clay Magouyrk, Executive Vice President Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
"A hybrid and multi-cloud mindset is becoming the new normal. With Red Hat Enterprise Linux available on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, our clients can now migrate newer applications to OCI without changing the underlying environment, helping to accelerate transformation initiatives, and ultimately realise value faster," notes David Wood, Global Strategy Lead, Accenture Cloud First.
