Sun chum Oracle pushes database buyers to IBM
T2+ blunder spells Rock disaster in waiting
SaaS data loss: The problem you didn’t know you had
Comment A couple of years back, Oracle chief Larry Ellison and then Sun CEO Scott McNealy held an event in Redwood City to renew their vows. Oracle signed on to ship Java for ten more years, and Sun started bundling Oracle's database on its servers at no charge. That last bit was meant to give Sun an edge over hardware rivals, although we can't claim to have heard of it ever making a difference in the market and aren't even sure the deal is still going.
What we do know is that Oracle is working over Sun customers who have adopted the multi-core T2 processor and its recent successor the T2+. In fact, Oracle looks set on exacting some measure of punishment on Sun customers who - dare we say it - want to use the T2 boxes for databases.
Oracle, like IBM, continues to fight the shift toward multi-core chips with all its might, since the beefier silicon threatens to erode per processor licensing revenue. So, the database maker has come up with a system for pricing different processors at different levels based on how many cores they have and how many threads they handle.
In the past, Oracle actually threw Sun a teeny bone, agreeing to price four-, six- and eight-core versions of the T1 processor on a .25 X number of cores basis. So, an eight-core T1 counted as a two processors in the per processor licensing scheme. Oracle, however, kicked Sun's highest-end T1-based server - an eight-core unit running on 1.4GHz chips - up to a factor of .50.
Meanwhile, AMD and Intel chips are meant to be priced by a factor of .50, and all other chips are meant to be priced at a factor of .75. These figures apply to Oracle Enterprise Edition, since Edition One and Standard Edition work on the more sane per-socket basis.
The thing about Oracle's processor pricing chart (PDF) is that it's not terribly good at keeping up with the processor game. For example, IBM's now selling Power6-based systems running at 5.0GHz, and we can only assume they're priced at the same level as the older Power5-based boxes. Pretty soon, HP and Sun will start shipping Unix boxes based on four-core chips, and we suspect Oracle won't get around to updating its list for those suckers, just as it hasn't updated its list for four-core x86 parts.
Sun customers that we're hearing from are particularly aggravated because they thought Oracle and Sun had a good thing going around the UltraSPARC T1 chips. But those joyous days of yore have passed.
Oracle, we hear, is charging a factor of .75 for Sun's T2 and T2+ systems even though they're running at about the same speed as the T1s. The major difference with the new chips is their support for more threads and the fact that the T2+s can go into multi-socket servers making them more useful for, er, databases. And by "more useful" here we mean "useful at all" since no one in their right mind would have thrown the older T1 systems at Oracle.
The .75 T2 factor comes as quite a shock to Sun customers who have upgraded their hardware only to have the Oracle tax man come along and tell them that the solid price/performance they were expecting via the hardware will be eroded via the software.
Next page: Gentle IBM? Surely not.
COMMENTS
RE: gizmo
Why is it that if you don't sing the Sunshine song then it's gotta be cos you are a competing vendor's salesgrunt? I know you Sunshiners sniff something "special" every day but you're going to have to accept that a lot of users just don't want your kit, and the longer you guys spend wriggling around looking for any feeble excuse to buy Sun when everyone else has already dropped them just keeps the rest of us laughing!
Baa baa
Weather the T class is suitable for OTLP or db warehousing or even general database usage is quite irrelevant. The point made is a processor is a processor is a processor regardless of religion. If i want a 486 powered Oracle EE version thats my prerogative(Insanity ;-p ) but Oracle is charging 1/4 CPU LIC for this 1/2 for that and 3/4 for everything else. Oracle is dictating what platform you should run it on and not giving customers the choice, which is their right. So your choice dictated by Larry is Xenon based on the best licensing/performance scenario.
Some of us are stuck with Oracle and for us, the captives, we should at least have right to choose what we run it on with a fair licensing scheme.
Baa, this sheep is tired of being sheared. Wheres a wolf when you need him?
T2+ does nothing to support Oracle
Sun has positioned the T5240 as a database server, but it does nothing to address the reason why it was never meant for databases. The Niagara chip can only run very light threads and requires applications to have many threads to show decent performance. Sun's changes to the Niagara chip actually made it worse for data serving applications. The T2 processor increased the threads sharing the core from four to eight and the T2+ removed two memory controllers from the chip.
The T5240 is an extremely expensive two chip system with a $480,000 Oracle EE price tag. Sounds very similar to when they couldn't give the E10K's away for free for Oracle because of the poor performance/Oracle License.
From Sun's own presentation:
"Not So Positive Characteristics:
- If one thread is thrashing the L1 instruction cache, data cache or TLB's on a core, it can adversely affect other threads on that core
- If all threads run on the same core they are only gettin gone-quarter of the CPU time
- So CMT is not ideal for real time applications
Scaling issues to be aware of
- Hot locks are the most common reason applications fail to scale on CMT processors
- Tuning Critical Sections
- Apply more threads as CMT is a thread rich environment"
Yo Matt....word up......Mr Mo Jo Risin
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