Re: Catching up on SPARC T5
The reason Oracle comes out fairly well on cost in the TPC-C is that they price their software support on Oracles largest systems at $2,300 a year. I could of course ask Oracle-employee Phil how many enterprise customers run this fantasy "support" model but I don't bother since both he, I and everyone else knows it is zero. The list price for Oracle database with a few options is close to $100,000 plus a hefty yearly percentage for support. And that is per *core*.
So any customer who knows how to operate a pocket calculator ie. not a typical Oracle customer, will find that IRL software totally dwarfs the cost for hardware by a factor of 15 to 20. So the logical conclusion is to aim for most bang for the buck on your DB licenses and that is:
Fast cores -> not sparc.
High utilization of cores - > absolutely not archaic Oracle Ldoms virt
And isn't it kind of embarrassing for Oracle that a 5 year old IBM server without the benefit of flash and SSD is on par in TPC-C with the newest and biggest Oracle server with twice the cores and 8 times the number of threads and 80 Tb of flash?. An Oracle system which is so new that it isn't even available for customers yet so no one else has the chance to do a compare.
"Why after all would IBM release Power systems that don't support AIX?"
Wow, after Oracle letting most of the Sun tech die a silent death it is good to hear that the FUD department is still expanding.
What is correct here is that for some of the Power models you have one Linux-only version which is cheaper(competes with x86) and one version which runs a choice of AIX/i /linux(competition fast fading away).
"Solaris is years ahead of AIX".
OK, you are never out in the field so I will tell you how this works. If you are at Solaris 10 and want to go to Solaris 11 you cannnot upgrade. So one has to find or buy a new server, install your new OS and application there and then you have to replicate what is years of configuration from the old production server. In the end you migrate the data and do a switch. This takes weeks, is risky and has extreme cost. You can call Solaris "the most advanced operating system in the universe"(true, Sun has stated this!) all you want but it is still amateur night.
With AIX it is a 10 minute reboot on an upgraded rootvg and a few minutes of relinking Oracle and you have upgraded your major version of AIX. That is enterprise for you.
And before you start about ZFS begin by telling us why Oracle does not use that tech in any of the aforementioned benchmarks.