JDEtips Cover Story Page 1 Page Red Stack vs. Blue Stack: A Fairly Detailed Overview of Oracle Technology Foundation for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne By Charles Anderson E1 Editor’s Note: Are you a Red Stack or Blue Stack Also, for those who choose to remain loyal to Big Blue EnterpriseOne user? No, we are not asking a loaded and their System i hardware: unless you either have a political question here…but we are setting the stage newer box which supports AIU partitions or you choose for an extremely informative article by Charles Ander- to run Windows or Linux servers on Intel x86 hardware son on Fusion Middleware. Charles shares with us a alongside your System i Enterprise Server, the Blue candid perspective on this up and coming technology Stack may be one with which you remain friendly for from Oracle. If you are considering deploying Fusion some time to come. Middleware, this is the article you’ve been waiting for. March/April 2008 Volume IX Issue 2 March/April 2008 Volume Introduction Oracle Technology Foundation for JD Edwards Enter- Although Fusion applications priseOne, colloquially known as “Red Stack” by the EnterpriseOne user community and others, has evolved are not quite ready for over the past couple of years into an extremely capable and viable alternative to the IBM Technology Founda- “primetime”, Oracle Fusion tion, also known as “Blue Stack”. With Oracle Technol- ogy Foundation, Oracle is offering more than a limited Middleware is here today. use license for Oracle Database Standard Edition and Oracle Application Server Java Edition; they’ve cherry picked several valuable Oracle Fusion Middleware com- ponents. The harvest in this case is a robust application technology stack that delivers business intelligence and Has ConFUSION Set In Yet? reporting, business integration and real-time monitor- Really and truly, the Oracle Fusion Middleware moni- ing, Web services, single sign-on and portal capabilities ker is nothing more than marketing spin on several pre- to their valued EnterpriseOne customers. existing technology solutions. There are certainly tight integrations between several components of Fusion What Do You Get For Your Money? Middleware, but underneath the facade, it is not always Caveat emptor; both Red Stack and Blue Stack are as smooth sailing as one may be led to believe. essentially limited right to use licenses meant solely for Now that I have stated my formed opinion on the use in conjunction with JD Edwards EnterpriseOne. If matter, I would like to point out that Oracle Fusion you want to host a custom (custom, as in built outside Middleware is firmly positioned as the foundation of the JDE toolset) or other non-JD Edwards Enterprise for the next generation of Oracle Fusion applications. Journal One application on either Oracle Application Server or Although Fusion applications are not quite ready for WebSphere, you must obtain a separate and unrestrict- “primetime”, Oracle Fusion Middleware is here today ed full use license from either Oracle or IBM. The same and many EnterpriseOne customers have either taken rule holds true for all other components included as components of it live in production or they’re consid- part of either stack. Another potential “gotcha” is that ering a switch from Blue to Red. Of course this does you must be running JD Edwards EnterpriseOne 8.9 or not mean that all EnterpriseOne customers are ready better in order to utilize Red Stack. For this reason, a to ditch tried and true WebSphere; some are perfectly good number of EnterpriseOne users will likely remain happy where there are now. EnterpriseOne product Blue Stack aficionados for the foreseeable future, managers out of Denver have stated publicly, as well as provided they remain on Xe (the purported majority) to their customers, that IBM Technology Foundation and/or 8.0. will continue to be supported in the near term; it truly JDEtips JDEtips JDEtips.com JDEtips © 2008 Klee Associates, Inc. JDEtips 4On Technical is not known what will become of the Blue Stack as we and BEA WebLogic (BEA) for their Java Applica- Page 2 Page know it today if EnterpriseOne is “sunsetted” in favor tion Server (JAS) needs, though support for WebLogic of a path to Fusion applications. IBM wants to remind quickly ended as of EnterpriseOne Tools 8.94. Oracle us1 that Oracle has stated publicly that WebSphere will Application Server (OAS) support burst onto the continue to be supported with Fusion applications, but EnterpriseOne scene with the release of EnterpriseOne nothing has been cemented in terms of support for the Tools 8.95. This support extended from EnterpriseOne DB2 Universal Database. applications 8.9 all the way to the most current release as of this writing, EnterpriseOne 8.12. With all of the recent inquiries and general buzz about Red Stack on the message boards, at Collaborate and Customers who purchased OneWorld application OpenWorld user conferences, etc., I think it would be licenses in the late 1990s were not required to add most appropriate to first offer an overview of the indi- compulsory JAS server middleware licenses to their vidual components of the Oracle stack before compar- base application and maintenance agreements. This ing and contrasting the Red Stack components with the changed a few years later; now all companies who are Blue Stack (also known as the IBM Technology Founda- considering the purchase of JD Edwards EnterpriseOne tion for JD Edwards EnterpriseOne). must also determine which Technology Foundation they prefer, Red or Blue. This being an election year in the Note: I will consider the terms Oracle Technology U.S., I’ll try my best to refrain from any “Red State vs. March/April 2008 Volume IX Issue 2 March/April 2008 Volume Foundation, OTF and Red Stack to be equivalent and Blue State Battle Royal” analogies. interchangeable throughout the course of this article. Although the official Oracle marketing speak is of To add to the confusion, some customers and consul- course “Oracle Technology Foundation” and “IBM tants have recently started using the terms “Purple Technology Foundation”, neither Oracle nor IBM is Stack” and “Green Stack” to indicate either a blending endorsing or sponsoring this article in any way. So, I’m of the Red and Blue stacks. For instance: free to use whichever phrase I wish. – Company A may choose to run Oracle Database with Origins IBM WebSphere Application Server. In the beginning (or sometime shortly thereafter) Ed created World® and then OneWorld®. OneWorld was – Company B might be looking at Oracle Application without JAS, and “fat”; and Citrix was often used to Server but wish to remain on IBM DB2 UDB Data- deliver OneWorld to the desktop. base. Farms of servers growing Citrix hosted OneWorld and – Green Stack implies the use of SQL Server 2000 or reigned supreme. 2005 with either OAS or WAS. Then Ed said, “Let there be JAS”, and there was JAS. In the examples above, all options are perfectly viable due to the availability of standards-based database And Ed saw JAS, hesitated, but then said it was good driver interfaces such as JDBC which plug directly into enough; and Ed struck a deal with IBM. the Java Application Server and deployed applications. The WAS and DB2 UDB combo was the heir apparent; I’ve been told that “Purple Stack” is something Oracle later, new customers had no choice but to sign on the doesn’t have on the horizon and their price list seems Journal dotted line. to confirm this. You’d also be hard pressed to find a Microsoft SQL Server anywhere close to an Oracle price All kidding aside, of course we know that Ed (former list, but that doesn’t stop many a shop from running JD Edwards CEO Ed McVaney) is not and was not the the venerable RDBMS. I’ll be sure to steer clear of both Supreme Being. Ultimately JD Edwards was gobbled up “Purple” and “Green”, as the subject of this article is by PeopleSoft®. Soon after, an even bigger fish known primarily Red Stack. as Oracle Corporation appeared and, as they say, “that was that.” Finally, Oracle recently announced their definitive agreement with BEA Systems under which Oracle For a spell, EnterpriseOne (formerly OneWorld) users will acquire all outstanding shares of BEA Systems. were able to choose between IBM WebSphere (WAS) Little else is publicly known other than that this deal JDEtips JDEtips JDEtips.com JDEtips © 2008 Klee Associates, Inc. Knowledge This Article Continues… Subscribers, log in from our main search page to access the full article: www.JDEtips.com/MyAccess.html Not a Subscriber? Gain access to our full library of JDE topics: www.JDEtips.com/JD-Edwards-Library Visit www.JDEtips.com for information on the JDEtips University schedule, private training and consulting, and our Knowledge Express Document Library. 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