Re: oracle costs

Jack,
Few ideas here.
So, for the moment you have one contract with 48 EE processors or that is on multiple contracts because you bought them at a different time? That's important because you may be able to stop one contract and keep another. But if it is all in the same contract, then you have to re-buy the needed licenses if you want to reduce. And have a smaller discount then. The second point if you have to re-buy is whether you need EE or can go to SE where you count the sockets and you have one socket per server, right? That can be a huge cost saving. Of course you will not have the same protection as Data Guard. But there are solutions like Dbvisit standby which are ok if business is ok for a RPO of 10-15 minutes in case of failover.
Oracle VM is a good solution to limit the licenses on servers with too many cores. For sure it is something new to learn and setup, but you should not see it as "another VM stack" if you use it only for CPU pinning. You will not do HA, vMotion... with it
If you accept to stop test and dev in case of failover, then you may run on 2 servers only: PROD on one site and DR+DEV+TEST on the other. Franck.

On Tue, Oct 1, 2019 at 1:19 AM jh3dt68_at_yahoo.com < dmarc-noreply_at_freelists.org> 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.
>

--
http://www.freelists.org/webpage/oracle-l