Re: 10gR2 RAC on RISC or X86-64 hardware

On Mon, Mar 17, 2008 at 8:34 AM, Joop Gijsbers <jg_dba_at_xs4all.nl> wrote:

> I have a discussion with a colleague, Technical consultant with a
> hardware/IBM/AIX background about the benefits of the use of IBM p- series
> hardware instead of x86-64 hardware.
>
> His these is that because of Oracle Licensing RISC based hardware -
> especially the IBM hardware - always will be more profitable then a
> Linux/ASM architecture on X86-64 hardware.

I'm not an in-depth hardware guy either but I just went to the TPC website... and in the TPC-C (clustered and non-clustered) and in every single size category for the TPC-H, the system with the best published price/performance (which includes licensing) is either Itanium or x86[-64]. I'm not saying this closes the case, but to so quickly dismiss the Intel platform is simply ignorant.

From his experience he has a " rule of thumb" that there is a maximum of
> 250 concurrent " users" on a RISC based CPU and a maximum of 100 concurrent
> " users" on a Intel-based CPU. So because of the CPU licenses he argued
> that Oracle on Intel-based CPU will mostly more expensive then on RISC-based
> CPU, especially in the case of RAC (with EE).

In my opinion those "rules of thumb" are completely arbitrary and totally useless. The number of users on a system completely depends on what you're doing. For a decision support or analytical system (I/O driven ad hoc queries) you might be lucky to get 10 concurrent users on a CPU. For a website (80% small reads on the cache) I think you'd get laughed at for only getting 250 concurrent users per CPU.

-Jeremy

-- 
Jeremy Schneider
Chicago, IL
http://www.ardentperf.com/category/technical

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