Oracle Database License Change: IBM Punished

State of the Oracle Database Union

The Oracle Database Licensing has CHANGED, Effective Date: March 16, 2009!

The "Oracle Standard Edition One" and "Standard Edition" systems are charged on a "Per User Plus" basis, whichever is greater, on 2 sockets and 4 sockets respectively (the processor/cores option is not used) while the "Enterprise Edition" uses Named Users
http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/databaselicensing.pdf

Named User Plus: This metric can be used in all environments. Different minimums apply depending on the Database edition:

• Standard Edition One requires a minimum of 5 Named User Plus licenses or the total number of actual users, whichever is greater. Oracle Standard Edition One may only be licensed on servers that have a maximum capacity of 2 sockets...

• Standard Edition requires a minimum of 5 Named User Plus licenses or the total number of actual users, whichever is greater. Oracle Database Standard Edition can only be licensed on servers that have a maximum capacity of 4 sockets… Effective with the release of 10g, the Oracle Database Standard Edition product includes the Real Applications Clusters database option…

• The Enterprise Edition requires a minimum of 25 Named User Plus per Processor licenses or the total number of actual users, whichever is greater.

Processor: This metric is used in environments where users cannot be identified and counted. The Internet is a typical environment where it is often difficult to count users. This metric can also be used when the Named User Plus population is very high and it is more cost effective for the customer to license the Database using the Processor metric. The Processor metric is not offered for Personal Edition. The number of required licenses shall be determined by multiplying the total number of cores of the processor by a core processor licensing factor specified on the Oracle Processor Core Factor Table which can be accessed at http://oracle.com/contracts

Licensing a multiplexing environment: If Oracle software is part of an environment in which multiplexing hardware or software, such as a TP monitor or a web server product, is used, then all users must be licensed at the multiplexing front end. Alternatively, the server on which the Oracle programs are installed and/or running may be licensed on a per Processor basis

In short, if you are licensing Oracle on one or a cluster of IBM systems running on (POWER5 or) POWER6 on platforms between 1-4 sockets AND you are paying for every user of the system (i.e. every help desk agent), then you are OK.

Is Your Business Exposed?

If you are licensing Oracle on one or a cluster of IBM systems running POWER6 (or IBM System Z mainframes) and not paying on a per-user basis (regardless of the number of sockets per server)… and paying licensing on a Processor basis (with a core multiplier factor), then the licensing factor change will impact you.

The following table holds the per-core or per-processor factor (extracted relevant CPU architectures for SUN & IBM.) The items in italics indicate a license change.
http://www.oracle.com/corporate/contracts/library/processor-core-factor-table.pdf

Factor Vendor/Processor
0.25 SUN T1 1.0GHz and 1.2GHz (T1000, T2000)
0.50 SUN T1 1.4GHz (T2000)
0.50 Intel Xeon 74xx or 54xx multi-core series (or earlier); Intel Laptop
0.75 SUN UltraSPARC IV, IV+, or earlier
0.75 SUN SPARC64 VI, VII
0.75 SUN UltraSPARC T2, T2+ Multicore
0.75 IBM POWER5
1.00 IBM POWER6, SystemZ
1.00 All Single Core Chips

Partitioning can help mitigate the cost factors in the licenses. Higher end Solaris platforms use SUN Dynamic Reconfiuration while lower end platforms can use SUN Solaris 10 Containers (capped) to help license mitigation. (i.e. if it is thought that you may be out of compliance on an internal SUN based system, you could move the Oracle Database into a Capped Solaris 10 Containier on the same platform) which has fewer processors available, while the rest of the processors could be available for the other application processes in another container.
http://www.oracle.com/corporate/pricing/partitioning.pdf

Hard partitioning
Hard partitioning physically segments a server, by taking a single large server and separating it into distinct smaller systems. Each separated system acts as a physically independent, self-contained server, typically with its own CPUs, operating system, separate boot area, memory, input/output subsystem and network resources.
Examples of such partitioning type include: Dynamic System Domains (DSD) -- enabled by Dynamic Reconfiguration (DR), Solaris 10 Containers (capped Containers only), LPAR (adds DLPAR with AIX 5.2), Micro-Partitions (capped partitions only), vPar, nPar...

You would need to determine if you are using the POWER6 of a SystemZ processor, to understand exposure. Because the multiplier has increased, hard partitioning (LPAR, DLPAR, vPar, nPar) will not be able to directly limit your exposure - unless you implement fewer cores, to reduce your total number of cores, since each core will cost you more. The loss of a core, to bring your budget in-line, will result in a serious loss in CPU power (due to the high thread speed for the core) for a measly 0.25 multiplier increase in cost. Implementing partitioning under AIX may cost you more in IBM license fees, as well as orphaning a core or two, which may not be able to be realistically recovered in another application.

Clear as mud, right?