© 2009 Cisco Systems, Inc. All rights reserved.UCS C- Series v1.0 1

Controlling Oracle Sprawl & Costs

Danny Dunn

© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 2

Controlling Oracle Sprawl & Costs1. Consolidation options to control sprawl:

a. Physical via OFA

b. Logical via Multi-Tenant, aka Multi-Schema

c. Virtual via VMware or OVM

2. UCS options to control licenses costsa. UCS Right-Size via Service Profiles

b. UCS 2-Node BP via Service Profiles

c. High density, line rate, memory supports maximum density consolidation with maximum performance

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The Past• I have seen customers stand-up a 3-4 node RAC cluster, in part,

to eliminate two problems inherent with two node clusters, Single Point Of Failure (SPOF) and oversubscription. 

• These were valid concerns in the past when it could take days, or weeks, to replace a failed server. 

© 2010 Cisco and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. Cisco Confidential 4

UCS 2-node RAC Best Practice• With Service Profiles in now takes only minutes to replace a failed

blade and have the Oracle Instance rejoin the cluster. 

• Reduced RAC Node Count (HA & Oversubscription): Service Profiles provide 15 minute RAC node instantiation in the event of server failure.  This allows you to reduce the number of RAC nodes to only the cores needed for performance.  

• You do not need to over provision nodes, and associated cores, for HA and oversubscription reasons.  

• With UCS Service Profiles your exposure to a SPOF, and performance over subscription are reduced from days to minutes.  When you combine this functionality with recent advances in Intel processing capacity a 2 node Oracle RAC is a viable alternative.

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UCS 2-node RAC Best Practice• Short answer is 2 node is 50% less than 4 node.

• Oracle RAC licenses per node is $70,500.00 MSRP

• E5-2690 has 16 cores

• 16 x $70,500.00 = $1,128,000.00 per blade

• 4-node RAC cluster = $1,128,000.00 x 4 = $4,512,000.00

• 2-node RAC cluster = $1,128,000.00 x 2 = $2,256,000.00

• $2,256,000.00 / $4,512,000.00 = 0.5 = 50% less  

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Right-Sizing• It should be noted that a foundational component of Cisco’s Right-Sizing

methodology is the leveraging of Service Profiles. At the database tier this allows customers to control Oracle licenses costs and RAC node proliferation. These efficiencies are enabled through the state-less, on-demand, hardware provisioning, without virtualization, provided by Service Profiles.

 

• By implementing Cisco UCS Oracle Best Practices Service profiles can provide 15 minute RAC node fail-over in case of a server failure. This allows you to reduce the number of RAC nodes to only the cores needed for performance.  You do not need to over provision nodes, and associated cores, for HA and oversubscription reasons.  

• RAC cluster expansion, i.e., “n+1” growth, again by following Cisco UCS and Oracle Best Practices can be achieved in 24 hours.