Interesting Conversation:
http://gigaom.com/2012/03/10/oracle-has-a-cloud-computing-secret/
stupid dba:
Lots of really bad info in that article…
-$2.8M would be almost 120 intel cores of Oracle Enterprise Edition at list price. There are well known websites run on half of that.
-You couldn’t run a transactional DB on anything other than Oracle very successfully on 120 cores
-Unless your hosting provider is bleeding money, its going to cost you a *lot* more over 3-4 years than 2.8M to host that. The electricity alone to run that is far more than what you quoted.
-Could you come up with a segmented architecture to run in all on mySQL? Sure, you’d also probably spend an extra $20M in development costs to do it and manage it.
-As far as running a 2 node cluster on RAC – you’d only need standard edition and you’d closer to 30K in licensing then, not 900K.
-Oracle already announced its offering hosted “amazon” like public cloud databases for EE. You can let cat of the bag on your secret… cloud.oracle.com
-No serious company on the Web outsources its hosting. Its a great start up model, but the cost benefit is waaaaay past there when you’re at 2.8M in database licenses. This was Ellison’s knock on Force.com, you end up having to take a proprietary format that you *can’t* take off a public cloud (this is also a problem for Azure)
George Gilbert Sunday, March 11 2012
Mr. DBA (I can’t address you as stupid, since you’re comments are well informed):
“$2.8M would be almost 120 intel cores of Oracle Enterprise Edition at list price. There are well known websites run on half of that”
I think I know where your processor count comes from. $2,800,000 / $23,700 / core = apx 120 cores. Let me try to explain my math, since the pricing rules can be complicated.
Amazon’s largest EC2 database instance is “Quadruple Extra Large DB Instance” and it has 8 virtual cores at the equivalent of 1Ghz 2007 class Intel Xeons. So you take that EC2 database instance and then you convert the 8 virtual cores to 4 “Processor Core Equivalents” because of how Oracle accounts for 1Ghz 2007 class Xeon cores.
Enterprise Edition costs $47,500 per processor core and another $46,000 per processor core combined for the Real Application Clusters and Cache options – so that you can run in a configuration similar to a mirrored mySQL with Memcached. That totals apx $400,000 *per node*. So the two nodes in a cluster together total apx $800,000. That gets upsized by a factor of 2.5 to account for peak capacity. Even if the application runs at that peak 10% of the time, you have to pay Oracle *up front* apx $2,000,000 plus 22% for first year maintenance.
- Regarding the running cost of this configuration, the baseline configuration is a total of 16 virtual cores or 2 EC2 max database instances. Amazon’s fully loaded charge for running mySQL in that configuration is only $5.20 per hour. So unless Amazon is bleeding red ink, the electricity is included in that. Similarly, if you upsize that to peak capacity, it’s still only $12.00 per hour.
- Regarding the comment that Standard Edition would suffice, you couldn’t use the Cache option for memory-resident acceleration like Memcached, or any of the other Enterprise Edition functions for that matter.
- Regarding Force.com, apparently they are hard at work at moving off Oracle as the database for their PaaS offering as well as for the core Salesforce.com application itself. Once upon a time Scott McNealy used to boast that big applications needed big Sun boxes and he frequently pointed to Salesforce.com. Then they moved to commodity x86 boxes.
– Regarding building the site or application on a sharded mySQL architecture, you’re right. It is more difficult than using a proper RDBMS where you leave all physical management of the data to the DBMS. However, the default stack and application pattern for Web applications that emerged over the last 10 years was LAMP on sharded mySQL databases. Driven by Big Data requirements, It’s now evolving even further to include even more scalable databases labeled (or mislabeled) NoSQL or NewSQL.
- Regarding running on Oracle Public Cloud, see my response to Campbell Webb above. We still need to see pricing and how non-Oracle software can be accommodated.