If this post seems a bit like an “advertorial”, please believe me — it’s not. Well, at least it’s not an advertisement for Pythian in any way. What it is, however, is a post about a longstanding business partner of Pythian’s who run a very useful service I think more of you should know about. Rest assured there is nothing “in it” for me or for Pythian for writing this. (Doug, I look forward to hearing you out on whether this post was appropriate or not!)

As background, supply management as a discipline has grown leaps and bounds for managing the quality and cost of parts. I was reminded of this today as I was reading this outstanding analysis by the Boston Consulting Group of Toyota’s supply-management process and its related successes.

Supply management for services is a different matter altogether, and has not really achieved this level of discipline. I will save a blog posting on that subject for another day, as it turns out that the Pythian model actually enables some more advanced supply management methods to apply to infrastructure-management services. But as I’ve already said, this article isn’t about Pythian.

It turns out that there is a way to apply sophisticated supply management techniques to your database licensing costs in quite an efficient, turnkey manner, and that way is simply to outsource this work to Miro. I recommend this to Pythian customers all the time.

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Reading this article in hemant’s blog from last June, he made an interesting observation:

1. Oracle has priced for the Xeon QuadCore Processor at the rate of 1 Processor based on
the single socket justified as “When licensing Oracle programs with Standard Edition One or Standard Edition in the product name, a processor is counted equivalent to an occupied socket” for a 3-year licence. Thus, Oracle used the combination of “Processor, not Core” for SE/SE-One and 50% of List price for a 3-Year Licence.

The Oracle store website’s licensing page has the exact same wording.

This means that, with SE/SEOne, you can really stretch your Oracle licensing dollar: an 8-way box with a pair of quad-core processors can be licensed with SEOne (in the US) for $10k, and $2k/year for support (sold on a per-chip basis too).

Now imagine running it on an 80-core chip!