Re: Exadata patching + Oracle support

From: Niall Litchfield <niall.litchfield_at_gmail.com>
Date: Wed, 9 Jan 2013 14:49:21 +0000
Message-ID: <CABe10sanXr5881NfHMcz7N11MjNnFvtRWSSyB3NntQOFJTtQDQ_at_mail.gmail.com>



Up to a point m'lud. Sales (and therefore your management) is referring to http://www.oracle.com/us/support/premier/engineered-systems-solutions/platinum-services/overview/index.htmlthe bottom line of which is indeed that Oracle support will maintain and patch your systems for you including quarterly PSU patching (or in fact the engineered systems equivalent). IIRC Kevin Closson who used to work for Oracle in Exadata architecture but now works for a competitor started the Patch Madness meme and is on the list. My understanding of that meme is that Exadata is, largely, sold as a plug and forget solution, but in fact requires considerable ongoing patching and maintenance - for good reasons (like new functionality) as well as bad (errm CPUs being artificially clock limited in the bios). Platinum Services exists, I suspect, exactly to answer the concerns raised by customers who found that when it comes to IT appliances require more maintenance than when it comes to kitchens. It seems to me that signing up to platinum services however requires
  • enabling remote access for a support provider
  • understanding what is and isn't covered
  • 24/7 contactability
  • agreeing to 4 weekends patching a year with patches determined by the vendor.

All of those look like management decisions to me. I'd be very interested in what downtime if any was experienced by platinum services customers as a result of agreeing to patching each quarter and secondly how many times you actually got support fixing outages in 15 mins and/or development looking at unknown bugs within 30 mins of occurrence.

On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 1:57 PM, Stephens, Chris <Chris.Stephens_at_adm.com>wrote:

> Would anyone care to comment on the fact that Oracle sales folks are
> saying that Exadata patching is included in the purchase price of Exadata
> appliances + support vs. the "patch madness" I keep hearing about?
> Management is under the impression that Oracle would handle all patching
> if Exadata is brought into the datacenter. That's what Oracle seems to be
> claiming but I'm skeptical.
>
> Thanks,
> Chris
>
>
>
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-- 
Niall Litchfield
Oracle DBA
http://www.orawin.info


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Received on Wed Jan 09 2013 - 15:49:21 CET

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