It has been a while since we've summed up the Oracle Linux advantage over other Linux products. Wim Coekaerts' new blog entries prompted me to write this article.

Here are some highlights.

• Best enterprise Linux - Since launching UEK almost 18 months ago, Oracle Linux has leap-frogged the competition in terms of the latest innovations, better performance, reliability, and scalability.

• Complete enterprise Linux solution: Not only do we offer an enterprise Linux OS but it comes with management and HA tools that are integrated and included for free. In addition, we offer the entire "apps to disk" solution for Linux if a customer wants a single source.

• Comprehensive testing with enterprise workloads: Within Oracle, 1000s of servers run incredible amount of QA on Oracle Linux amounting to100,000 hours everyday. This helps in making Oracle Linux even better for running enterprise workloads.

• Free binaries and errata: Oracle Linux is free to download including patches and updates.

• Highest quality enterprise support: Available 24/7 in 145 countries, Oracle has been offering affordable Linux support since 2006. The support team is a large group of dedicated professionals globally that are trained to support serious mission critical environments; not only do they know their products, they also understand the inter-dependencies with database, apps, storage, etc.

• Best practices to accelerate database and apps deployment: With pre-installed, pre-configured Oracle VM Templates, we offer virtual machine images of Oracle's enterprise software so you can easily deploy them on Oracle Linux. In addition, Oracle Validated Configurations offer documented tips for configuring Linux systems to run Oracle database. We take the guesswork out and help you get to market faster.

More information on all of the above is available on the Oracle Linux Home Page.

Wim Coekaerts did a great job of detailing these advantages in two recent blog posts he published last week.

Blog article: Oracle Linux components http://bit.ly/JufeCD

Blog article: More Oracle Linux options: http://bit.ly/LhY0fU

These are must reads!