Stoked about the RedHat partnership
May 14, 2007 9:39 AM
Filed Under: Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) Linux Sybase News
It probably goes without saying, but I'm absolutely STOKED about the expanded RedHat partnership that was announced late last week.
It's no secret that here at Sybase that I'm one of the more active users of Linux. I've run it on my laptop since my second day at Sybase in 1999 (why not the first? Well, I had to make sure that I could integrate my laptop into the Sybase infrastructure good enough to do my job back then, it wasn't as easy as it is today). I'm so passionate about it that I'm trying to convert some of the other people in evangelism to running it full-time, and as a result am the subject of a lot of friendly jokes and other remarks from my co-workers, but hey I take it all in stride (and I give a lot of it back to 'em when they run into their own issues). I've written some internal docs on how to get things working under Linux, and even offer advice on how to live Windows-free (or, at least offer advice on how to get that must-needed Windows application up and running under Linux). So, yea, I'm a "pengunista".
Probably more important than that, I get a large number of calls and emails from our customers who are using Linux, and are either running into some cofiguration issues, looking for best practices, or are looking for performance and tuning advice. Those are always tough questions to answer, because Linux in and of itself provides interesting challenges in the server arena that other UNIX-based OS's (and even Windows) don't. The pace of development on everything from the kernel, to glibc, to gcc, to threading ... you name it ... causes some interesting challenges for us as a company and making sure that ASE runs optimally on Linux. Hardware in this space also changes and improves at a blistering pace, only feeding the fast moving development of the Linux kernel itself. I remember pretty well the days of having ASE not work from one Linux point release to the next, and to some degree we even have that problem today on the "open" or "community" releases. I've sought the help of David Wein more than once to help me with some ASE / Linux issues when a new release comes out (most recently with the change to glibc 2.4 on most distributions) but remember, these issues are a problem for most enterprise-level software companies, not just Sybase specifically. This is of course why companies like RedHat and Novell began to offer enterprise-level releases that were supported for a long period of time. Prior to them doing this, the only true way (in my opinion) you could guarantee server stability from a package standpoint for any length of time was to run something like Debian, but the main drawback to running Debian to most companies is that they don't have a compnay (like RedHat, Novell, etc) that they can call for support or problems, it's definitely community driven for the most part.
Anyways, to get back on topic here, with some of the things that have happened recently (as David said in his blog post last week, that "other" company offering support and re-packaging RedHat's own OS) in the Linux community, I think that this new partnership fits well into Sybase's idea of best-in-breed ... or what I like to call, do what you do well, and find others out there in the same mindset and work together to offer the best all-around solution. Releasing patches to both the OS and the database at the same time will solve probably the #1 question that I get (and ask internally) about certification and patching. We also see other companies doing the appliance play and having some success at the conceptual level, and having us move into this area in the Linux space makes a lot of sense to me. Most companies run database servers on a single host anyways, so having just a simple all-in-one machine that will do that, and having the customer know that everything works together, in my mind makes the DBA's life a little easier.
I can't wait to see this partnership take off, and be as successful as the IBM partnership arguably has been. David and I have blogged a bit about virtualization of the OS and the database; with the 2 companies working together I am hopful that we'll see a lot of positive things come out of not only database virtualization, but OS-level virtualization as well. Looks like Fedora Core 7 is offering KVM as well as Xen virtualization, and the latest kernels have really done a lot of work in this area, so I'm excited as to what we'll be able to offer and take advantage of in this space.
Until next time ...
-Chris
Posted by Chris Brown on May 14, 2007 9:39 AM
Comments
Carl Kayser email -
Any comments on http://www.it-director.com/technology/data_mgmt/content.php?cid=9502? I must admit that I agree with him on the abuse of "appliance". Does the Sybase position mean (shudder) that Larry was right about "appliances" years ago?
Also, does Sybase plan to include ASA as an "appliance"?
Chris N. Brown email -
Carl,
I read the article you referred to (and, I'm happy to see that the article is positive about the partnership). True, there are a lot of industry buzzwords that are over-used and diluted (FUD, Web 2.0, "seamless", just to name a few), I think that the author of the article over-simplifies and generalizes too much about the meaning of an appliance in this case. In response to some of what he said, no, I don't think that SAP and Oracle are "appliances" simply because they don't work as one ... you but the pieces separately, and integrate them yourself. The concept of an appliance here is that everything will work as one (hence the washing machine analogy in the press release - can you imagine buying all of the parts of a washing machine and putting it together yourself (SAP, Oracle, etc) ... or would you rather just buy the whole thing and just use it (Sybase and RedHat appliance in this case)?). I'm not going to say Larry was right or wrong years ago, but he was pushing the network computer at the time I believe .. and we have yet to see that come to pass (possible that's a subject for yet another blog post .. thanks for the idea!!). Finally, I know of no plans to have ASA as an appliance, just IQ and ASE right now but that could always change.
