A Study in Tweeting
I follow @oracledatabase on Twitter for obvious reasons. They tweeted a “case study” last week on the use of Advanced Compression to save money. You can find the case study here The end customer migrated from MSSQL to Oracle for a low terabytes size datawarehouse. Unfortunately we don’t get details of the old hardware or setup, but we do discover that the new hardware consists of a 16 processor AIX system and that 1.5tb of the available 2.75tb disk space is used. (and that a 2:1 compression ratio is achieved so we get a current saving in disk space of 1.5tb approximately).
The tweet chooses to major on “Customer migrates from #ms_sql_server and gains cost savings with #Oracle Advanced Compression.” Cost savings are indeed mentioned in the white paper, although it is difficult to see that a 2:1 compression ratio is likely to significantly outperform NTFS compression which can of course be used transparently with the old technology, and in fact there are strong indications that the driver was strategic rather than cost sensitive.
I don’t particularly have any beef with the case study, though it isn’t the strongest case study I’ve ever seen. I do have a beef with the cost savings argument. The Advanced Compression option costs $156,000 for 16 processors for the first year which works out at approximately $100k per terabyte saved. That sort of sum of money will buy you an extraordinary amount of storage. In addition you’ll be paying $34k per year each year to offset against the reduced storage administration time needed each year. I’d suggest that if you are spending $34k per year on storage management time for a 1.5tb database then you’ve got something badly wrong.
Not the best of examples, I agree.
Mike
9 Aug 10 at 11:27 am