To provide customers with immediate access to enterprise-class support and enhancements available in the newly released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 operating system, Oracle and Red Hat today announced that key Oracle products have been certified on the new release.

With today's announcement, Oracle and Red Hat again showcase leadership in delivering the support and technology customers need to run Linux in the enterprise. Organizations will realize significant benefits from enhancements in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, optimized for the Oracle environment, including better support for large servers and larger number of CPUs. Additionally, customers can rely on Oracle to provide a single point of contact with world-class, seamless technical support of both Oracle and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 -- available in conjunction with the unveiling of the new Red Hat platform.

"Years of collaboration with the goal of enterprise customer success have made our relationship with Oracle strong and reliable in the enterprise," said Paul Cormier, Executive Vice President of Engineering at Red Hat. "Oracle and Red Hat's commitment to the Linux platform is evidenced by our effort to have Oracle products pre-tested, optimized, certified and supported on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 and immediately available to customers."

With thousands of global customers, Oracle has invested considerable resources in pre-testing and certifying the platform for enterprise-class applications and grid computing. Oracle infrastructure and enterprise application products, including Oracle Database, Oracle Application Server, Oracle Collaboration Suite and Oracle E-Business Suite have been certified to run on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, which incorporates the latest advancements available in the Linux 2.6 kernel.

"Our customers will benefit greatly from the powerful combination of robust Oracle products and the advanced functionality available in this latest Red Hat distribution," said Wim Coekaerts, director of Linux Engineering, Oracle Corp. "Linux has been, and will continue to be, a cornerstone of Oracle's vision of enterprise grid computing. The advancements in the 2.6 kernel distributed through Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4 help ensure customers can use Linux for the most compute-intensive environments."

Performance Leadership

Together, Oracle and Red Hat have set a number of industry leading performance benchmarks. Oracle was the first to exceed one million transactions per minute with world record performance on Linux of 1.18 million transactions per minute on a 16-node HP Integrity server cluster running Oracle Database 10g and Oracle Real Application Clusters. With the distribution of the new 2.6 kernel in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4, Linux brings the same performance and reliability it's known for on low-end servers to large SMP boxes.

Oracle's Long-Standing Commitment to Linux

Since introducing the first database to run on Linux in 1998, Oracle has been committed to furthering Linux adoption across the enterprise. Support has been a hallmark of the Oracle-Linux organization since June 2002, when Oracle began providing code-level support for the entire software platform and the operating system. Currently, customers from the around the globe tap into Oracle's 6,000-strong global team for 24/7 technical support for Linux. Additionally, Oracle boasts the largest Linux-based development organization in the world with more than 9,000 developers leveraging the operating system to create Oracle products. Oracle also has a Linux Kernel Group dedicated to working with Linux vendors to provide fixes and develop new functionality to benefit the Linux community.

Linux Available on Oracle Technology Network

To date, more than one million downloads of Oracle?s products for Linux have been registered. Developers interested in downloading source codes and Oracle products on Linux, can access the Oracle Technology Network at http://otn.oracle.com/linux.

About Red Hat

Red Hat is the world's premier open source and Linux provider. Red Hat is headquartered in Raleigh, N.C. and has offices worldwide. Please visit Red Hat on the Web at www.redhat.com.