Doing more for less with your Oracle database

Low cost?

I suppose everything is relative.

With commodity X86 servers being very cheap it really galls people to have to fork out at least one order on magnitude more for the DB to run on the kit.

It is any wonder tht in the SME space that more and more people are looking at MySQL which is owned by Oracle where the software can be had for free and support does not cost an arm and a leg.

Granted that compared to Oracle, MySQL is lacking a lot of features but for a good % of users is is more than adequate enough.

An Oracle advert - woo

Fails to point out that licencing costs are automatically adjusted to absorb your savings...

Are you sure you need that Standard Edition? ...

when there are many alternatives that serve your purpose for less, or even no cost ...

Or...

... migrate to a different database for much, much bigger savings?

(un)common sense

How about rather than spending massive amounts of money on additional software (& infrastructure to run it on), businesses actually take a bit of time to understand exactly what data theyve got, what purpose it serves and what value it has....before throwing more good money after bad

A well thought out & properly implemented archiving strategy can substantially reduce the amount of 'live' data in your production databases, whilst simultaneously providing performance improvements, consolidation onto fewer CPUs and allowing you to actually use tiered storage for what its for. It can help avoid the need for partitioning (@ approx £5k per core) and other more complex solution for managing vastly bloated relational DBs.

Sometimes we forget to look at the obvious and continue wasting money on perpetuating the same problem...

Hmm

I suggest a challenge for the students of IT: configure a reasonably balanced server on which the hardware will cost more than the Oracle licenses.

Reading the title made me say "Use Postgres"

Or perhaps I'm wrong and someone can actually post a real world experience of reducing Oracle licensing costs?

The only way I know of doing more with less in the Oracle world is by not using Oracle.

Part 1 - Only way to control Oracle licensing cost

IBM’s Power servers are the only platform to control Oracle licensing cost. With x86 the performance seems to go down with each release while the overall socket performance goes up because the total number of cores increase. With Power server, each successive generation of server delivers more performance per core so for a static workload the overall licensing requirement would go down.

.

For a typical x86 solution to host an Oracle Enterprise Edition database, customers would not deploy Oracle on x86 in production without some form of increased availability like Oracle RAC. This adds $23k/co to the existing $47.5k/co price for the EE DB. I use list because they are consistent in all comparisons. Discounts can be applied but it doesn’t change the ratio of savings, just how much.

.

With the Power server, additional clustering is not required to address or overcome the inherent deficiencies in the server platform like it is with x86. It is often included though for business reasons to ensure all reasonable measures have been taken to avoid an outage. If increased availability is required, customers may choose to go with a traditional cluster product like VCS (I still call it this) or something like PowerHA, which I prefer as it is less expensive and more robust. Customers may also choose to use Oracle’s RAC.

.

Want to see how Oracle on Power is less than x86 ….. Read on! I'll pick a random x86 vendor that will let me get pricing from their website

.

HP DL380 Gen8 - qty 1

2 x 6 co @ 2.4 GHz E5-2440 totaling 12 cores

128 GB Ram

vSphere Enterprise Plus

Assume Linux – pick your distro of choice

3 year support

No internal HDD - assuming USB boot

2 x dual port 10 GbE

2 x dual port Fibre

All power cores, rail kit, misc

$25,183 each server List price

.

.

Oracle Licensing cost

Enterprise Edition - $47,500 per core

EE maintenance @ 22% per year - $10,450 / co

RAC - $23,000 per core

RAC maintenance @ 22% per year - $5,060 / co

.

.

IBM’s latest Power8 server

S824 Power8 server - qty 1

(this is the 2 socket model although I just selected it with 1 socket)

.

8 x 4.15 Ghz Power8 cores

256 GB Ram (need more Ram because I’m planning to host more VM’s)

DVD

Split backplane

4 x SSD (building the way I would built it and not just to lower the price which I could do by using HDD)

2 x dual port 10 Gbe adapters

2 x dual port Fibre adapters

AIX v7.1

PowerVM Enterprise Edition

3 year 24 x 7 maintenance

$79,807 server list price

Part 2 - The Math to control Oracle licensing costs

Now the math and the comparisons!

.

Server: HP DL380

Cost: $25,183

qty of servers: 2

Server cost: $50,366

# of cores in solution: 24 (2 x 12 co servers)

Oracle Licensing Factor: .5

# of cores needed for Oracle (actual): 5 (nice to know but doesn’t matter for licensing)

Total Oracle Licenses required 12 because (24 * .5 = 12)

.

.

Oracle EE Lic cost: $570,000 (12 * $47,500)

Oracle maint cost (3 yr): $376,200 (12 * $10,450 * 3)

Oracle RAC Lic cost: $276,000 (12 * $23,000)

Oracle maint cost (3 yr): $60,720 (12 * $5,060 * 3)

Total x86 server + Oracle cost over 3 years: $1,333,286 (Add it all up)

.

.

Server: S824

Cost: $79.807

qty of servers: 1

Server cost: $79,807

# of cores in solution: 8

Oracle Licensing Factor: 1.0

# of cores needed for Oracle (actual): 3 (it does matter here)

Total Oracle Licenses: 3 (either in a dedicated or SPP with proper boundaries)

Oracle EE Lic cost: $142,500 (3 * $47,500)

Oracle maint cost (3 yr): $94,050 (3 * $10,450 * 3)

Oracle RAC Lic cost: $ Not required

Oracle maint cost (3 yr): NA

Total Power server + Oracle cost over 3 years: $316,357

.

.

The 3 year total cost of ownership for the x86 solution shown is $1 Million dollars more than a Power8 solution. The Power solution is very typical for what we might see or use with customers. We would also consolidate the app servers and other workloads onto the Power server whereas customers typically would put the App servers on separate servers - which means even more cost.

.

Somebody may question or say it isn’t fair or that it is convenient of me to just use 1 Power8 server whereas I am comparing it to 2 x HP x86 servers. Just in case, here are those numbers. Don’t want somebody to not like me accuse me of making things up ☺.

.

Using 2 x Power8 servers instead of 1 to compare:

.

Server: S824

Cost: $79.807

qty of servers: 2

Server cost: $159,614

# of cores in solution: 16 (2 * 8 cores)

Oracle Licensing Factor: 1.0

# of cores needed for Oracle (actual): 6 (because each server has 3 co in a Active / Active cluster)

Total Oracle Licenses: 6

Oracle EE Lic cost: $285,000 (same math as above)

Oracle maint cost (3 yr): $188,100

Oracle RAC Lic cost: $138,000

Oracle maint cost (3 yr): $91,080

Total Power server + Oracle cost over 3 years: $861,794

.

.

For those who want everything equal the Power solution is still $470K less than the x86 and everything else I have said remains true. If the Oracle workload grows and needs more resources, the Power server can dynamically add a single (or fraction of) core at a time and any increment of memory to the VM. You just add the appropriate Oracle licensing. Likewise, if the workload were to decrease you could dynamically remove cores and memory as well and even redeploy Oracle licenses to other workloads or other servers - a license at a time. It is all about flexibility.

.

Heaven forbid you had a x86 Oracle RAC environment Plus VMware with more servers than are configured with RAC where you would license Oracle at $70,500 per core across all of the cores in that vMotion cluster farm. In the example I have shown above though, it will cost significantly more to run Oracle on x86 with or without VMware vs running it on Power. Cheers!