Oracle continued its acquisition spree this week by snapping up Ksplice, a company that sells a zero downtime update technology for Linux. Ksplice enabled system administrators to apply updates and patches without rebooting or otherwise taking a server down.
According to the announcement, “Oracle believes it will be the only enterprise Linux provider that can offer zero downtime updates, and expects to make the Ksplice technology a standard feature of Oracle Linux Premier Support.”
This seems like a fairly small acquisition, but it’s interesting in light the data we covered regarding the relative traction of various Linux and Unix vendors. To recap: enterprise Linux distros haven’t yet overtaken enterprise Unix in the data center, and most data centers use a mix of Unix OSes from different vendors.
Oracle sells both Linux and Unix, but it seems like Oracle is moving to take its Linux version to the next level and this signals how serious Oracle is about its Linux line.
