Jack,
This is messy territory and the house has the advantage. My advice is,
don't try to do this on your own. If you are not working through a partner
that specializes in Oracle licensing, start there.
Seth
On Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 6:19 PM jh3dt68@xxxxxxxxx <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Hello all,
Where I work we have Oracle EE running on 4 physical Dell servers, all
running Oracle 12.2 and RHEL 7. The environments are PROD, DR, TEST and
DEV. At present all of the servers have 4 sockets with 12 cores per socket,
for a total of 96 CPU cores of Oracle EE . Unfortunately, due to budget
cuts, management is asking us to reduce our annual Oracle maintenance
costs, either that or we have to lay off a couple of developers, there are
15 people total in our shop. Our first thought was to combine DEV and TEST
as both of those environments are not fully utilized. That would reduce our
core count by 1/4. But digging into the contracts and the world of Oracle
licensing (ugh), it looks like Oracle could re-calculate the maintenance
costs based on the current list price of annual support, not on the
discount price we received when buying Oracle 4 years ago. That means we
wouldn't pay more but maintenance costs might not be any less. The other
idea we had, was to convert the CPU licenses to Named User Plus licenses
for DEV/TEST. There are only 15 people who ever use the DEV/TEST
environments and we would leave PROD/DR alone for now. I understand there
are processor minimums which must be accounted for, but if we combine the
DEV/TEST and switched to NUPs I'm hoping it would result in some cost
reduction, even if Oracle tries to claw back some of the savings.
Any insights or suggestions are greatly appreciated,
- Jack H.
