Archive for the ‘licensing RAC cost’ Category
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.
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Oracle Standard Edition
Recently a question came up on Oracle-L, but to tell you the truth it might have been anywhere about how on earth one justified Oracle’s licensing. The question was
To get an idea of how much it would cost to license a point of sale database on Oracle and commodity hardware/software, we requested a quote for a 2-node RAC on Dell 2950′s 2 Dual core’s per server. Quote was $306k.
Well if I were the business I’d choke as well. That’s an indefensible software cost for that sort of install. I costed up a quad-core E5430 version of the above hardware, complete with, RHEL5, 16gb RAM and redundant SAN connections. Total cost of the hardware (but excluding the SAN/NFS storage that you’d use for RAC) just about $20,000. That’s for the two servers. So the questioner was being quoted 15x the cost of the hardware (and 3 years worth or so of DBA time at US rates last time I looked) for the Oracle software. Any time you see the software costing more than dedicated admins and an order of magnitude higher than the hardware/OS then you have to work very hard to justify the cost.
There is an alternative though Oracle Standard Edition will do all of the above for you on that hardware. The Oracle store quote for the dual quad-core machines I listed above was $65k Now that’s a much more defensible – though still high cost. Now it may be that the EE only features (DataGuard, Flashback Table (not query), block level recovery, the pl/sql function result cache in 11 and so on) are worth nearly $250k for the questioners business, but you do have to wonder. Of course on my quad-core based install the EE license fee would be $468,000
Update following Herod’s comment and to make my quote clear. This is the oracle store quote for 8 processor licenses for both EE and RAC based on 50% of the total number of cores in the system. Next to it is the US pricing for the hardware
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