Multicore License: Create Better Value

Miro Consulting leverages multicore licenses to increase worth of Oracle licenses

Multicore Licensing: Your path to getting your “money’s worth” from Oracle licenses

Multicore processors are standard in enterprise server platforms. And, the changes in multicore licensing counts can have a serious ripple effect on a company’s budget, increasing licensing costs by 25 to 50 to 100 percent or more at any given time. However, on the flip side, multicore can also become a source of major savings in licensing costs and bring a bigger “bang for the buck” as well as added value to any purchased licenses.

The fact is that multicore processors can have a positive impact to your overall Oracle license value. Any products licensed by actuals in processor or universal power unit metrics or licensed by minimums in concurrent device, Named User, Named User single server, Named User multi server and Named User Plus are impacted by a move. Oracle utilizes a multiplying factor for licensing core processors, i.e. – 0.75 for RISC based processors, 1.0 for Intel Itanium Series 93XX, 1.0 for IBM Power6 and 0.25 for Sun UltraSPARC T1 processors, when calculating license requirements for servers with multicore processors.

Example: A single server running Oracle Database Enterprise Edition with 4 single-core Intel processors would require 4 Processor Licenses or a minimum of 100 Named User Plus licenses. When that server is replaced with a server using 2 dual-core Intel processors, which is a total of 4 cores, it would require only 2 Processor Licenses or a minimum of 50 Named User Plus Licenses. The result of the example server change would be a server that requires half as much licensing as it did before, but would maintain the same or better performance.