September 29, 2008
Eric Lai on Oracle Exadata, and some addenda
Eric Lai offers a detailed FAQ on Oracle Exadata, including a good selection of links and quotes. I’d like to offer a few comments in response:
- Over the weekend, I updated my understanding of Oracle’s server-side parallelization. The new version is here.
- I get a different (and higher) gross price figure than the one Eric cited. His figure is more common than mine, so I can’t immediately explain the discrepancy.
- The price/terabyte figures cited were for spinning disk, rather than the more useful — but hard to calculate precisely — user data. Spinning disk figures are better for vendors with low compression ratios, like Oracle. (Pending more confirmation, I don’t trust the strong the apparently high Oracle figure in the LDR example.) User data figures are better for ones with high compression ratios, like columnar vendors.
- It’s possible that Greenplum’s $20K/TB figure is for user data, while the others are for spinning disk. On the other hand, in Greenplum’s case the two numbers may be similar. (Hopefully, somebody from Greenplum will soon clarify.)
- Larry is absolutely correct that Netezza lacks b-trees. Netezza is ACID-compliant even so, but one can certainly construct OLTP-heavy examples where b-trees would give better performance than Netezza’s approach.
Categories: Data warehouse appliances, Data warehousing, Exadata, Greenplum, Netezza, Oracle, Pricing
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4 Responses to “Eric Lai on Oracle Exadata, and some addenda”
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Regarding pricing, I believe that the $2.33 million figure for a whole system is misleading.
During the keynote, Ellison put up a slide about pricing, which showed the price for a fully loaded ODM as $650,000 (hardware) + 1,680,000 (licenses), which amounts to $2,330,000 total. But there was a comment to the software licenses part of the slide: “Use your existing database licenses & 0% discount on storage server software”.
So it looks to me that the $2.3 million figure applies only if you already have the Oracle licenses and want to migrate an existing DW to the Database Machine. Otherwise you have to pay extra.
That makes sense. It’s hard to imagine where the number could be coming from otherwise.
I emailed you asking for permission to upload your version of the spreadsheet, by the way.
From Oracle’s Exadata Price List:
http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/exadata-pricelist.pdf
1 Database Machine = $650K
Exadata Storage Server SW = $10K/disk; 168 disks/DB Machine = $1,680K
$1,680K + $650K = $2.33M
Looks like $2.3M is for Database Machine HW + Exadata Storage Server SW with no Oracle Database licenses.
Right. The server-side licenses in general aren’t counted. But the server-side hardware is.
$2.3 million is a remarkably meaningless number.