Re: N1 And Other Changes To The Data Center

Niall Litchfield wrote:

> I'd love to be proven wrong but since the licensing agreement for Std
> Edition shows that you cannot install it on a machine that is "capable" of
> housing more than 4 processors (even if you only actually have 2) I'd
> suspect a wild attempt to say "well you could allocate 32 processors to
> oracle at any point - stump up the cash buster"
>
> :(

Yup. You are right about the 'capable of ...' and about the 'could allocate ...' taking you out of Standard Edition range - that is the core of Oracle's 'Partitioning' document on http://www.oracle.com under the Licensing & Pricing section. (And we all thought it was the Partitioning option <g>)

I've noticed Oracle tends to leave licensing in place as long as possible, and only changes when the customer base restarts their moan about how expensive the product is (or is perceived to be based on competitor's FUD). So unless they do this with 10i, we probably have 'till June 1, 2005 to discuss this.

This whole N1 & equivalent push will allow Oracle to really showcase RAC on small (1-4 CPU) Dell/Linux machines. And I can see some environments with RAC where you could swing a licensed RAC machine from one Oracle cluster to another for extra CPU during end-of-month processing - I did the architecture once, customer failed before implementation.

However, Oracle already has part of the license stuff in place with the 2 & 4 year licenses but they need to provide finer granularity (one day?). With their Outsourcing offering, they already have the monthly billing in place. The only real challenges I see are: getting the periodic reports on useage, which might be available directly from the h/w vendor reports; keep the final per-unit charge reasonable.

'By the CPU tick'? Just think - we can return to yet another variant on Power Units! How about T-BUPU Time-Based Univeral Power Unit <g>

Daniel's questions:
"install on a 1 CPU machine and then ..." - would require dynamically changing the parallelization capabilities to take advantage of the new CPUs, wouldn't it?

"install on a 10 CPU machine but make 6 ..." - is the hub of the entire discussions about "server consolidation by function", "one server for Oracle, separate server for app", and "dedicate the server so you can tune the machine". We already run into that all the time, and IMHO this is a big part of what makes Oracle appear much more expensive than it really is.

Oracle did consider creating a billing engine for their apps. Maybe now they will become serious, or maybe acquire someone like Portal who specializes in telco & isp billing solutions. New vision - bills from Oracle just like your cell phone bill! Received on Thu May 22 2003 - 09:08:44 CDT