There are a great number of companies out there who will admit that, at times, Oracle licensing can be confusing and many customers may be unsure of the best approach to take when choosing the right hardware due to this fact.
If you are going to run Oracle Database Enterprise Edition (EE) there are some key platform considerations from a licensing perspective, and the hardware platform you choose has a significant impact on licensing costs for one thing.
For example, if I was deploying on UNIX and I had four Oracle licenses I can run those on eight Oracle SPARC T-Series CPU cores but only on half the number of IBM Power 7 CPU cores.
Then, let’s take a database and assume that a company has decided it needs need four Oracle Database Enterprise Edition licenses and some additional options, but wants to allow headroom to grow. The multiplier for these licenses is 0.5 for Intel CPU and Oracle SPARC cores. That means they can use their licenses on an eight core server with either of those CPUs.
For the lowest possible solution cost in this situation they can use a commodity Intel based x86 server from Oracle, use Solaris x86, and use Solaris containers at no extra cost to limit CPU exposure. This is closely followed by Oracle SPARC servers which provide extra grunt, scalability and additional virtualisation capabilities.
The server can have as many CPU cores as they like and they can control how many are used by the database. If the organisation involved buys more database licenses later, they can increase the CPU exposure and will cost them nothing to do that. They do not need virtualisation management workstations or complex virtualised networks.
Choosing the wrong platform can lead to expensive bills for overexposing the database to CPUs, something which is avoidable but can happen far too easily. What you cannot do is use non-Oracle virtualisation technologies to limit the CPU exposure to the database. Regardless of what these are the entire server CPU core count must be licensed.
In order to best manage this situation from both a performance and financial point of view customers really have to weigh up the pros and cons of running an Oracle hardware platform versus an alternative. We can help you choose the most cost effective hardware platform for your chosen licenses and maximise the CPU power attributed to those licenses. At Synoptix, we also provide built-in server growth from day one.
Choosing the wrong platform can lead to expensive bills for overexposing the database to CPUs, something which is avoidable but can happen far too easily
In addition, if a customer already has Oracle Database Enterprise Edition licenses on older single core CPU systems we can migrate them to modern systems and re-purpose or retire up to 75% of the licenses.
Oracle has worked hard to ensure that it’s advantageous to use their hardware with their software. If you are looking to deploy Oracle technologies talk to Synoptix first for the best configuration for you.
Terry Cox is a director with Synoptix
Ltd
