Re: N1 And Other Changes To The Data Center

Daniel Morgan <damorgan_at_exxesolutions.com> wrote in message news:<3ECCE004.63BF03B5_at_exxesolutions.com>...
> 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.

Methinks the technology will allow this, but the management/marketing oversimplifications, horsetrading, and general avariciousness of the companies involved will _make_ it a bad thing.

jg

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