Re: Oracle RAC cost justification?

Here's one that rather surprised me when I found myself arguing for a RAC 
implementation. 
We wish to host a new public website. This of course must 'always be 
available with redundant everything, be highly scalable because everyone in 
the UK will want to visit it', I believe I saw a reference to making 
mladen's coffee in there somewhere as well. The conventional solution to 
this is to use an applications hosting company. On the other hand have you 
priced up external application hosting for say 3 years recently? 

You can start with RAC with a couple of dual processor blade servers 
attached to shared storage (we use a SAN) for 54,000 list price (we are 
actually decommissioning an Oracle system so we don't need to pay for the 
licences. Now if you really do need 8 processors then things get much more 
expensive very quickly. 

So if you bear in mind that you can do RAC very cheaply (well OK free) up to 
4 processors and that you can start to think about replacing other services 
(or consolidating existing servers into the cluster). 

I think the key selling point here is the, possibly rather moot, scalability 
argument for those "but now I'm sharing a database with all those other 
folks how can you ensure that my performance is OK' moments. If you want to 
do HA then you need DataGuard or a Standby, IMO. 




On 6/1/05, Khemmanivanh, Somckit <somckit.khemmanivanh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I just wanted to get people's opinions on the cost justification for
> RAC.
> 
> The following are list prices.
> 
> $40K per processor for Oracle EE license + $20K per processor for RAC.
> 
> If I want to have a total capacity of 8 CPUs that's $160K of RAC
> licenses. How are people justifying RAC in such a scenario -- is it less
> expensive to buy 2 4 way SMP boxes rather than 1 8 way SMP box? Anyone
> have rough price figures they can share for Unix boxes (just for
> comparison)?=20
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> --
> http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l
> 



-- 
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
http://www.niall.litchfield.dial.pipex.com

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