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_at_weyerhaeuser.com> 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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