Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC), introduced with Oracle 9i in 2001, supersedes the Oracle Parallel Server (OPS) database option. Whereas Oracle9i required an external clusterware (known as vendor clusterware like TruCluster Veritas Cluster Server or Sun Cluster) for most of the Unix flavors (except for Linux and Windows where Oracle provided free clusterware called "Cluster Ready Services" or "CRS"), as of Oracle 10g, Oracle's clusterware product was available for all operating systems. With the release of Oracle Database 10g Release 2 (10.2), Cluster Ready Services was renamed to Oracle Clusterware. When using Oracle 10g or higher, Oracle Clusterware is the only clusterware that you need for most platforms on which Oracle RAC operates (except for Tru cluster, in which case you need vendor clusterware). You can still use clusterware from other vendors, if the clusterware is certified for Oracle RAC.