Standby database & licensing

From what Oracle told us, it would cost about 100,000$ to setup a standby database (Enterprise Edition) on a 4 CPU box. Considering this would be at a remote site, and the machine would only ever be used in case of disaster recovery (that is, no connected users ever unless the primary datacenter is blacked out), we find it's not cheap.

If loosing 5-6 hours of work (all I need to recover) costs less than 100K$, it's not worth it.
I can already copy over all the archive logs to the remote site as they get created so there will not be any more transactions lost than with the proposed standby db architecture.

A couple' years ago the same would have been 40,000$. Used to be minimum of 10 users licences per CPU at 1000$ but they changed the rules to be a minimum of 25 user licences per CPU 2 years ago. Those are not exact $ figures, but close enough.

We could also buy a 1-CPU machine but it would cost much more than the 100,000 Oracle is asking for the licenses.

Does everyone pay this kind of money to maintain a standby database? Is there something we were not told?

Just asking, as it looks like I will not have my standby at all...

-- 
Syltrem

OpenVMS 7.3-1 + Oracle 8.1.7.4
http://pages.infinit.net/syltrem (OpenVMS related web site, en français)
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