Re: N1 And Other Changes To The Data Center

Hans Forbrich wrote:

> 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!

Quite frankly that is what I expect. And that's not saying it is a bad thing. But it is defnitely a thing.

--
Daniel Morgan
http://www.outreach.washington.edu/extinfo/certprog/oad/oad_crs.asp
damorgan_at_x.washington.edu
(replace 'x' with a 'u' to reply)