A $100K investment in server and storage improvements can save about $2M off the three-year total cost of a large Oracle deployment, writes David Vellante in the latest in a Wikibon series on Oracle licensing optimization stretching over two years.

The reason that a relatively small investment in infrastructure, and specifically on areas like increasing server memory and adding flash storage to the server, can have such a huge payoff is that Oracle licensing is priced by the core. By increasing IO performance on the server, you can reduce the number of cores.

This latest Professional Alert, “Oracle Negotiation Tips: Focus on Reducing License and Maintenance Costs,” goes beyond this important tip to review and validate previous reports and offer other suggestions and some important don’ts as well, creating an outline for an overall strategy for Oracle negotiations.

One big piece of good news is the validation of a 2011 David Floyer Alert, “Damn the Torpedoes: Virtualize Oracle as Soon as Possible”. Wikibon members who followed that advice have found that while Oracle sales will push back some in negotiations when customers virtualize with non-Oracle hypervisors, in the end Oracle “has been professional and responsive with regard to support.” So virtualization definitely should be part of an overall Oracle license optimization strategy.

Vellante recommends that users treat Oracle negotiations as a large project and build a team that includes business, legal, applications, IT operations, compliance, and procurement to be sure everyone is on the same page. They should give the infrastructure people a larger voice in setting strategy and specifically invest in:

• Adding memory to processing cores,
• Leveraging flash storage to improve response times and reduce latency, and,
• Optimizing/balancing processing and storage infrastructure.

By following these and other recommendations in this and the earlier Alerts in the Oracle negotiations series, all of which are listed with their links in Vellante’s Alert, Oracle users can optimize their investment in one of their largest single IT costs, their Oracle licenses.

This Alert, like all Wikibon research, is available free of charge on the Wikibon Web site. IT professionals are invited to register for free membership in the Wikibon community. This allows them to comment on research and post their own tips, questions, Professional Alerts, and white papers. Membership also comes with invitations to the periodic Wikibon Peer Incite meetings, at which your peers discuss how they use advanced technologies to solve business and IT technical problems.