Tim,
Is this part accurate?
A new Dell R740 server running dual Xeon V2 82xx CPUs with 28 cores apiece
would kick the butt off any two of those old servers, if not all four of
them. Two such servers, each with 56 cores, is only 112 cores to license
2x28 = 56 but it's only 112 with hyperthreading, right? And hyperthreading
isn't licenseable IIRC?
Chris
On Mon, Sep 30, 2019, 8:43 PM Tim Gorman <tim.evdbt@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Jack,
When running any software licensed by CPU, smaller numbers of faster CPUs
are less expensive than larger numbers of slow CPUs.
What you described in your email seem to be six-year-old Dell database
servers, probably E5-2697 Xeon processors with 12 cores? Unless I
misunderstood, you mentioned four (4) servers, each with 4 sockets, each
socket with 12 cores. To me, that is 4 x 4 x 12 which totals to 192, not
96, cores to license.
A new Dell R740 server running dual Xeon V2 82xx CPUs with 28 cores apiece
would kick the butt off any two of those old servers, if not all four of
them. Two such servers, each with 56 cores, is only 112 cores to license.
Updating the hardware will drop your core count from 192 to 112 while
improving performance dramatically.
Oracle EE licenses with a 75% discount (i.e. list $47,500/core to
discounted $11,875/core) is a licensing drop from $2.28m to $1.33m. If
your discount is less than 75%, then savings are even bigger. If your shop
has only 15 people, I'm betting even money that your discount isn't 75%.
Figuring that a decently loaded R740 can be bought for about $60,000 or
less, the $120k hardware purchase pays for itself with $950k licensing
savings. That'll pay for some VMware/OVM licenses too, with enough left
over for salaries for a couple developers or DBAs.
The only way a hardware upgrade wouldn't pay for itself is if there is a
97.5% discount (i.e. $1187.50/core is $228k for 192 cores and $113k for 112
cores, difference of only $115k). And with a 97.5% discount with Oracle,
your time is better spent on other concerns. :)
Please re-purpose those old servers for software not licensed by CPU, and
keep the Oracle licenses on new fast hardware.
This is a golden opportunity to ditch those old boat-anchor servers, and
to ditch the boat-anchor concept of "physical servers" as well, and build a
nice VM farm for databases.
Just my US$0.02...
-Tim
On 9/30/19 4:18 PM, jh3dt68@xxxxxxxxx (Redacted sender jh3dt68 for DMARC)
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.
