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Should Dual Cores Require Dual Licenses?

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the symmetrical-multi-paying dept.

sebFlyte writes "The multi-core debate continues. HP and Intel have laid into Oracle and (to a lesser extent) BEA over their their treatment of multi-core processers. Oracle's argument that 'a core is a CPU and therefore you should pay us all your money' isn't a popular one, it would seem. What does Oracle's stubbornness imply for the industry as a whole, with multicore chips coming to the fore so strongly?"

2 of 425 comments (clear)

  1. They aren't the only ones by ToasterTester · · Score: 4, Informative

    Veritas is as bad or worse on "Tiered pricing". In past Oracle was worse and they charged on potential CPU's. If you had a eight CPU server, but only four CPU's installed they still charged for eight CPU's.
    This is what drove many Oracle users to Windows, because Intel based servers tend to be smaller.

    Oracle came after the place I was working for being out of license by around a million dollars. After a long negotiations Oracle agreed to charge us per installed CPU. So after signing the agreement with started pulling CPU's and max'ing out RAM. We ended up only owing Oracle a few thousand, and maintained performance with the extra RAM.

    Veritas NetBackup is the same thing. Explain to me why it cost more to backup a multi-CPU server.

  2. Re:Oracle is asking for it... by Creepy+Crawler · · Score: 5, Informative

    There's a way you can be a real ass about that situation, whilst running all 4 of your CPUs.

    First, it can be easier if you were running Linux, but the way it sounds, youre running solaris, right?

    Well, if you do happen to be running Linux on this, just nab the 2.6 kernel, and make a Usermode Kernel. Run Oracle under the UML kernel, where it cant touch any hardware at all, without going through an abstraction layer. What it doesnt know wont hurt it. Even better yet, you could run this "Kernel Job" on proc #3 and give it sole prio over that CPU (in other words, run only that process- the UML process).

    Since, you're probably running Solaris, I believe there's 2 possibilities.. For one, VMware I believe can run on that architechure. Just do with VMware what you can do with UML Kernel. Run it on last CPU like UML. Sits there happy as a clam at high tide.

    The last possibility is what Im not completely not sure of. I believe the new solaris had UML-like capability and to partition hardware resources to seperate "Computers". Since Im not quite sure, I'll have have you go look at Sun's website about possibly looking down that path of execution (heh I made a funny).

    Nevertheless, if there's a method of little overhead that partitions hardware resources, it's something you ought to look into.

    Just an idea ;)

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