Hacker News Reader

Comment by cafard | Hacker News Reader

"However, due to licensing costs, the software cost for the server farms comes in at $1,807,406.00, with the mainframe running at only $416,883.00."

Well, yes. Oracle charges per core, and you are running Oracle EE on an awful lot more cores. But what if you are running Postgres instead?

View on HN

It is not shown, but I expect that Oracle EE is probably the most significant contributor to software licensing costs. If Oracle licensing was computed for 288 cores, that is totally unrealistic. Oracle EE would only run on a subset of cores.

In 1996 I remember Oracle was licensed per user. We were planning to use it to back a Netscape Publishing System (IIRC) for a portal with both open and subscription-based areas.

Guess what happened when Oracle learned we were planning to have 3 million users...

If I recall correctly, Oracle licencing would actually require to pay for all the 288 cores on the host even if just a subset of the VMs in that virtualization run Oracle.

True for all x86 virtualization i know of. But not true for IBM Power LPARs where only the entitled CPU resources have to be licensed and can even be shared between LPAR (Power Enterprise Pool). I don't know for sure but would therefore assume that it's the same for the IBM mainframe platform.

I know Fujitsu have a version of Postgres made for LinuxOne (which is just Linux on z/Architecture) No idea what they are taking for support of it though.

I laughed when I saw websphere and Oracle preinstalled.

But they are dependencies for very popular software, like IBM FileNet...

Spilling coffee of innocent people, shame on you!

You're only laughing because you're not the one who has to make it work in production :-)

Nah, laugh-on, it will never fully work on production.

True. But the exec who bought the "discounted package" from that salesdroid will never know the difference.

Just don't tell 'em that you really just installed Apache and replaced the admin login page.

Yes, whatever happened to DB2, or whatever it's called today (was UDB upon mainframes then DB2, though was different from DB2 upon AIX and X86, then there was this fetish to prefix things with the word web or suffixe them with the word sphere and I lost track around that time).

The z13 hardware is a bit more costly, but yearly maintenance and ops cost is lower. The margin would probably be lower (you'll still want some support from vendors) but the convenience of having all your data-center inside one box is tempting.

How does this work with virtualized machines? Do you pay per underlying core, but if yes, how do you know how many physical cores you are using ?

At least some years ago Oracle required to pay per underlying core - you don't need to know how many you are using at any point of time, you pay for all cores that can be used.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com