RE: T3 processor/system & Oracle License

From: David Mitchell <DavidM_at_HECB.WA.GOV>
Date: Fri, 1 Oct 2010 07:40:16 -0700
Message-ID: <B65AF78D0CE7B84FA42421F2647B72DB024F8148DB_at_mail1.hecb.wa.gov>



"Why should you expect to be able to do more processing for the same money?"

Because that is the path other vendors have chosen. We run MS SQL Server here along with Oracle and MS only counts physical processors for their licensing. We have relatively modest needs at our shop so those same dual processor servers we've been buying all along still use the same license count regardless of the fact that they now contain multiple cores. I'm not sure what I'm going to do come the next Oracle upgrade cycle when each processor now contains X cores and my license count starts a never ending climb. In my opinion, given the industry shift from the Mhz race to the core count race, a reasonable licensing policy needs to take this shift into account and not force their customers to switch to other vendors to control costs. Just my .02.

David



From: oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org [oracle-l-bounce_at_freelists.org] On Behalf Of Tim Hall [tim_at_oracle-base.com] Sent: Friday, October 01, 2010 7:15 AM
To: jeremy.schneider_at_ardentperf.com
Cc: zhuchao_at_gmail.com; ORACLE-L
Subject: Re: T3 processor/system & Oracle License

Hi.

Why should you expect to be able to do more processing for the same money? If you remember back in the day Oracle used to charge less per socket for Intel than other CPUs (Sparc, Alpha, RISC) because the performance of Intel in comparison was so crappy. Once intel played catch-up that discount was removed.

Fast forward and Oracle [started | were forced to start] charging different prices for sockets compared to cores because they recognized a core was not equivalent to a socket in terms of performance.

Fast foward again to the future and if you tell me that in a 64-core socket, each core is not as productive as a core on a 4-core socket, then I will expect a reduced cost per core on the 64-core chip compared to the 4-core chip, but if they are equally productive, I would expect to pay the same per-core price.

It strikes me you have a choice:

  1. You buy a big new server and you choose to use all the cores so you should pay for the extra licenses.
  2. You buy a big new server and use virtualization to create a VM that is pinned to X number of cores. Your licensing costs have not changed and you have lots of extra cores free to do something else with.

Multi-core does not have to affect your licensing. There will be many companies who don't need the umph who will use bigger servers to consolidate. Those that do need the extra horsepower do so because their requirements are growing, so they should expect to pay more money.

I would not buy a Ferrari and expect to spend the same on petrol as I do for my Renault Clio. :)

If you are listening Larry, please send me lots of cash for my justification of your crappy pricing model.

Cheers

Tim...

On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 4:57 PM, Jeremy Schneider <jeremy.schneider_at_ardentperf.com<mailto:jeremy.schneider_at_ardentperf.com>> wrote: I was just talking about this at OpenWorld. I'm getting increasingly frustrated with Oracle (and other folks are getting frustrated too). Oracle needs to fix their broken licensing model.

For the past few decades, Moore's law has been applied to processors by making smaller more efficient circuits and thus faster chips. In that ecosystem, Oracle could charge by socket or by core because there was room for processing growth without automatically doubling license costs.

Today the chips can't get any smaller. Moore's law is applied to processors by increasing parallelism. Intel says "this new chip now has 64 cores!!" ...and I say "NOOOOOOOO! My license costs!!!!!"

We need to maintain the growth of processing capacity we've had for the past few decades, but nobody can afford to start doubling our database license costs every year. This business of "fractional pricing for cores" isn't going to fix anything in the long run. Oracle REALLY needs to do something about it, and I'm getting a bit tired of waiting... these costs are getting a little crazy for the average business.

-Jeremy

Zhu,Chao wrote:
> with recent release of the T3 processor/system:
>
> so does anyone know how oracle is going to license the new T3
> processor for its oracle database server? in T2 it was 0.75/core, so
> each socket uses 6 oracle license;
>
> With T3 not adding more threads to each core, and each socket with 16
> cores, each socket is going to use 12 oracle license then?
>
> Also in the very early days the tech specification from external (even
> wiki) was each core of the T3 processor is going to be 16 threads
> (instead of the current 8 threads, which is same as T2); Was oracle
> afraid of charging each core 1.5 license:)?
>
>
> --
> Regards
> Zhu Chao
>
>

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Jeremy Schneider
Chicago

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Received on Fri Oct 01 2010 - 09:40:16 CDT

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