xmlisnotaprotocol: November 2012

A Colleague ( http://twitter.com/ZoranGagic ) sent me this great breakdown of x86 vs Power7 for hosting oracle...nice to have it all in one spot (below) also this http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2011/07/even-more-reasons-to-run-oracle-on-vmware.html makes a similar case and now that VMWare have softened up on the vSphere 5 memory tax there is not as much need to go 4.1 as per below

	HP c7000 with 16 x BL460 G8	IBM 770
CPU cores	16 x 16 = 256	26
Memory	16 x 144GB = 2304	512GB
Performance, SPECintrate2006	16 x 662 = 10,592	942
Price	est $200K	$452K (approx)
COD	None	18 cores/512GB, cost: $10K for 1 core/16GB

Price difference		2.3 x more expensive
Performance difference	11.2 x faster
Price /performance difference	25.7 x better price performance

This does not include virtualisation or OS costs, but numbers are overwhelming….

General purpose CPU - Intel Xeon E5-2600:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/03/06/intel_xeon_2600_server_chip_launch/print.html

This will be in every major rackmount, blade server, standard chipset support 24 DIMM sockets (24 x 32GB = 768GB), 10 GbE etc….

(Sub $10K for 16 core server with over 144GB memory)

Xeon E5 (2.3b transistors, more CPU cores (8), less heat/power due to 22nm process, bigger L3 cache (20MB)) :

http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2012q1/cpu2006-20120211-19458.html

16 cores, 2 chips, 8 cores/chip, 2 threads/core

SPECint_rate_base2006 = 662 (41.3/c)

Power 770 with Power 7:

http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2010q1/cpu2006-20100208-09583.html

48 cores, 8 chips, 6 cores/chip, 4 threads/core

SPECint_rate_base2006 =1740 (36.2/c)

Xeon 5670 in HP BL460:

http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2010q2/cpu2006-20100524-11203.html

12 cores, 2 chips, 6 cores/chip, 2 threads/core

SPECint_rate_base2006 = 318 (26.5/c)

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/pricing/technology-price-list-070617.pdf

http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/contracts/processor-core-factor-table-070634.pdf

Enterprise Edition Per-core licensing

Multi-core processors are priced as (number of cores)*(multi-core factor) processors, where the multi-core factor is:

IBM Power 7 CPU Pool with 8 cores = 8 x $47,500 = $380,000

Intel E5 with 16 cores = 16 x $23,750 = $380,000

Better to buy a low cost Intel E5 based server with maximum memory available (768GB) and choose VMware ESX 4.1 (not huge memory costs with ESX 5) and RHEL 6.2 on a farm of blade servers such as:

http://www.dell.com/us/enterprise/p/poweredge-m620/pd

HP BL460 G8 is available with Intel E5 CPU:

http://store.vmware.com/store/vmware/en_US/pd/productID.126818400?resid=T1iZSAoHAtcAACq6rR4AAAAG&rests=1331206471307

(VMware ESX 4.1 Enterprise Plus - Unlimited memory

VMware vSphere 4.1 Enterprise Plus for 1 processor (Max 12 cores per processor) + Production (24x7 for Severity 1 issues) 3 Year Support

$5,723.70

https://www.redhat.com/apps/store/server/

2-sockets with unlimited virtual guests

Standard Subscription (1 year) $1,999

Premium Subscription (1 year) $3,249

Oracle Prod on physical database farm with RAC (or one node RAC to keep it very simple)….many instance on one OS image:

- Large memory (Intel memory is cheap), separate SGAs for different instance – no memory contention