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Welcome to the third installment of a series describing the Oracle Exadata platform. In part 1 we talked about hardware components, and in part 2 went on to discuss software. We now move on to how these components are packaged and licensed.

Unlike version 1 of the Oracle database machine, which was sold in full-rack increments only, version 2 introduces the concept of half and quarter rack configurations for smaller products. All database machines include a full-size physical rack for equipment, networking equipment including two redundant InfiniBand fabrics, the Cisco administrative switch, a KVM management unit, and power distribution units.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

Update 04-Aug-10: I’m happy to see The Illumos Project announcement.

Update 17-Aug-10: So Oracle seems to drop OpenSolaris project. Let’s see if Illumos pulls it off.

I’m tired reading all over the internet — Oracle taking back OpenSolaris, Open Solaris May Die
?, Solaris Is Dead, Save Open Solaris, Oracle taking back OpenSolaris.

I’m so sick of it!

I see that some don’t even know the difference between OpenSolaris and commercial Oracle Solaris (former Sun Solaris 10)!

Wake up people! Oracle did make commercial Solaris 10… eh… commercial, that is. They (well, Sun but Oracle paid big $$ for it) have invested lots into Solaris IP and they have full rights to actually charge money for it and they probably should. Struggling Sun made commercial Solaris free to use in desperation to maintain their rapidly shrinking market share. Oracle doesn’t need that – they are not desperate. You’ve made the right decision Oracle – keep Solaris commercial and use these funds to continue developing this great operating system (or whatever makes business sense).

Having said all this, what does it have to do with OpenSolaris? Nothing!

OpenSolaris was and is free. I have just quickly skimmed through the licensing (Binary License and CDDL) and there are no caveats that I can see like 90 days limitation or whatsoever. All the OpenSolaris goodies are still available to everyone for free.

Whining starts that Oracle will not contribute to OpenSolaris anymore. Come on people! Couldn’t you just appreciate what’s been done already and what a great product OpenSolaris is? If you forgot what open-source is about, it’s about community contributions and not about a single vendor giving away its IP so that everyone around can scream how great open-source movement is what great products it produces. If one vendor pulls out and community can’t sustain product development, then the product cannot live its normal open-source life.

Get over it! Want a high quality software with great support without any fuss? Pay $$. Want a high quality free open-source software? Make it happen!

Update 13-Jul-10: I’m keeping an eye on the OpenSolaris community news and it’s been so far discouraging..

On Monday August 31^st, Gowlings hosted a debate on open source licenses organized by the Free and Open Source Software Learning Centre (FOSSLC).

The debate was conducted between the proponents of three major Open Source licenses: Mike Milinkovich for the EPL, Matt Asay for the GPL, and David Maxwell for the BSD license.

It was organized into three rounds: first the panelists had ten minutes to sell us their license of choice. Then they were given five minutes to rebut points made by the two other panelists. A final one minute was given to rebut any rebuttal. After those three rounds, the audience—both the live one and that watching the feed—asked their questions.

From what I could estimate, between 50 and 70 people physically attended the event. Andrew reported that between 25 and 50 viewed the live feed. Videos of the event are available on the FOSSLC site.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

One of the customers (actually a prospect) here in Australia asked me about minimal Oracle licensing on a quarter rack database machine. This prompted a thought of using Oracle Standard Edition instead of full blown Enterprise Edition with bunch of options.

Before even going into possibility of using Oracle SE for the database machine, let’s see if we even want to.

Why Oracle Standard Edition?

If the environment is data warehouse then it’s extremely unlikely that Standard Edition will cut it. Lack of many feature make it non-feasible to use for data warehousing — no partitioning licensing, no parallel query, and dozens more.

Oracle Standard Edition might fit OLTP environments depending on the application design and data volumes. Since Database Machine is made to store large amounts of data, we assume that it makes financial sense to run databases that are quite large. Oracle SE lacks some critical features in order to successfully manage VLDB (Very Large Databases). It’s not impossible and depends a lot on the presence of outage windows, how active is the development life-cycle, availability requirements and etc.

Where Standard Edition seems to fit nicely is Read the rest of this entry . . .

I was reviewing Oracle’s Processor Core Factor Table, which lists the multiplier used to calculate the Oracle Enterprise Edition CPU license requirements, and noticed something interesting: the preferential 0.5 core multiplier that formerly applied to all Intel/AMD chips has now been restricted to:

• Intel Xeon Series 74XX, Series 55XX or earlier Multicore chips
• Intel Itanium Series 91XX or earlier Multicore chips
• Intel or AMD Desktop, Laptop/Notebook, or Netbook Multicore chips

What does this mean? Although most if not all currently-available processors see no changes, future multicore server CPU generations will have a cost factor of 1.0, doubling the cost of licensing them for Oracle. For a single Quad-core server running Oracle RAC, it would result in $166,000 in additional licensing costs.

Is Oracle covertly hiking their license fees? Or will they loosen the restrictions once new processors arrive? Do they remember the backlash to their earlier multicore policies?

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.

Read the rest of this entry . . .

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!