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Home -> Community -> Mailing Lists -> Oracle-L -> RE: Reasons to upgrade from Oracle 7.3.4 to 8i
I'd suggest support.
Issues I've seen are the hardware needs replacing, they don't make that size of hard drive any more, that version of the operating system doesn't support the new hard drives that are available. The new version of the operating system isn't supported by Oracle 7.3.4. The hard drive doesn't have to fail for this one by the way you can just run out of disk space the effect is much the same. Remember if you need to do a fancy restore you need more disk space.
The developers upgraded their tools and they no longer have the tools to maintain the old system.
The hot backup software product no longer offers complete support for that version of the database. That one was a nice one, it wasn't an Oracle database but we really did need to do a restore following a RAID failure and their technical support took the line if the database company no longer fully supports that version then we cannot help you. We figured a way round it eventually but there were a few nervous moments.
How do you do you backups? On tape? What happens if your tape drive dies? Do you have another exactly the same model that you can do the restore to? I've seen cases where being able to get the restore back from an old type of media has been an issue. How old are your tapes? They do experience higher failure rates the older they get. Again the newer drives are not supported under the old version of the operating system etc.
Skill sets, Oracle training under 7.3.4 is no longer available from Oracle.
It's a lot easier to move to a new system when the old one is still running.
If they are really into costs, then use something like Gartner Group costing on the server. I think you'll find that Support costs are one of the highest costs. Internally we reckon it costs about $20,000 Can a year to keep a server going. That's a Compaq Windows 2000 server. The Unix servers we think cost more. Given the capital costs involved it makes sense to replace the servers every three years these days that way its under warranty from the moment it arrives until the moment it leaves.
Also see what their down time costs are. I had one client who had a 100 people entering data on a server. He was concerned about the cost of a new server until he saw what a day's worth of down time would cost him. Use that argument if they want to go Brand X as well rather than a Compaq or SUN type of quality box.
Another angle is their current support contract on their server. I've seen cases where the annual 7 by 24 support costs where more expensive than replacing the server with a 3 year 7 by 24 warranty.
If your organisation is moving towards a SAN that can often generate its own pressures to upgrade. In general we have had good experiences in performance improvements and reliability going SAN. Central tape silos help as well, normally they have multiple drives and support contracts so if a drive fails they just carry on albeit a bit slower.
Software costs. This one sounds dumb but we had a 4 cpu server with slow cpus, add up the megahertz. In our case a new server with a single cpu was available with a higher megahertz than the old one had with the 4 cpus added together. The savings from a 4 cpu licence to a single CPU licence were substantial, more than enough to pay for a new server. Yes I know that databases don't usually bottleneck on the cpu but quite often you'll find multiple cpu servers running databases where the person who specified the server didn't understand what a database server needs for performance.
Finally we had a large database load that took forever and could only be done on the weekend. The client was amazed that it was so much faster on the new version of the software / server could now be done overnight. That meant they could implement some business changes / improvements.
Cheerio John
-----Original Message-----
Sent: August 19, 2002 9:33 AM
To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L
Dear gurus !
I know it's a "beaten to death horse", but...
I want to convince a customer to upgrade their OPS 7.3.4 DB to an Oracle
8.1.7 OPS or even (in a best case for me) to Oracle9i RAC (don't even know
whether or not one exists and is supported for Digital UNIX on EMC Symmetrix
storage).
I am sure this has been discussed 1000s of times here , but ... i need the
arguments to convince them.
I can't tell them "upgrade because 8.1.7 delivers better performance ,
availability etc...and 7.3.4 is outdated" , they simply won't buy it.
They run that OPS 7.3.4 DB for several years now and are quite happy with
it.
I need to explain in details why they should invest in the upgrade.
Now , the only real reason i can think of is partitioning . They will
definetly benefit from it.
I need more reasons.
Thanks a lot in advance.
DBAndrey
--
Please see the official ORACLE-L FAQ: http://www.orafaq.com
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Author: Andrey Bronfin
INET: andreyb_at_elrontelesoft.com
Fat City Network Services -- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California -- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists --------------------------------------------------------------------To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: ListGuru_at_fatcity.com (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing).
Fat City Network Services -- (858) 538-5051 FAX: (858) 538-5051 San Diego, California -- Public Internet access / Mailing Lists --------------------------------------------------------------------To REMOVE yourself from this mailing list, send an E-Mail message to: ListGuru_at_fatcity.com (note EXACT spelling of 'ListGuru') and in the message BODY, include a line containing: UNSUB ORACLE-L (or the name of mailing list you want to be removed from). You may also send the HELP command for other information (like subscribing). Received on Mon Aug 19 2002 - 12:24:14 CDT
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