Category Archive: Compliance

Asset Discovery

Categories:

Compliance, Cost Reduction, Hardware, Licensing, Software Asset Management

March 31, 2012

The first step in Oracle Optimization is to understand what is running in the data center. Many organizations, however, do not have asset records that are readily available or accurate. It is often necessary to scan the network for what products are in use. Oracle presents a challenge in that its software is freely available online, does not require keys and installs extra-cost options automatically.

There are various options for discovering assets ranging from open-source to enterprise software packages, each appropriate depending on size, complexity and need. I can provide asset discovery services, Enterprise Manager (12c) mentoring, or if necessary, broker discussions with tools providers that fit your budget and scope.

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Compliance Risk Mitigation

Categories:

Compliance, Licensing, Software Asset Management

February 29, 2012

In my experience, 80% of compliance mistakes fall into five categories. If you avoid these mistakes, then a surprise, expensive true-up is not likely. Therefore, step one in mitigating compliance risk is to become educated on Oracle’s standard policies and any nonstandard terms in your original order documents that would affect entitlement. As a side note, I highly recommend this blog post about contemporaneous agreements.

If you have received an audit letter, then understanding what to expect and how to respond become vitally important. Multiply the feeling of seeing police lights in your rear-view mirror by $millions and you can understand the importance of having a calm, vendor-independent trusted adviser in your corner throughout the process.

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Oracle on VMware, Part 4

Categories:

Compliance, Licensing, VMware

February 24, 2012

My friends at iQuate hosted a VMware presentation recently. Click here for the replay.

For those who may remain unclear or recalcitrant, Oracle requires that its software be licensed on every physical core within a cluster of VMware servers. CPU affinity and host affinity are not recognized as limiting factors for licensing. Here’s a fun example: consider a single instance of Oracle Enterprise database running within a VMware farm of 8 servers, each with 4 10-core chips. The licensing requirement is 8 * 4 * 10 * .5 (x86 core factor) * $47,500 (unit list price), or $7.6M in list licensing. That makes for one expensive database, eh! What about pinning that particular virtual machine to a specific couple of cores within a specific machine? Nope. Gotta licensed every core in the farm. Read the rest of this entry »

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Introducing the Oracle Costimizer Beta Program

Categories:

Compliance, Consolidation and Migration, Cost Reduction, Licensing, Maintenance, Software Asset Management

January 30, 2012

I’m looking for beta testers of software that helps organizations reduce the cost of running Oracle.

The Oracle Costimizer is inspired by the reality that most organizations struggle to manage their Oracle assets effectively, let alone set themselves on a path towards savings. Does that remind you of your own organization?

Features of the “Costimizer” include automated compliance analysis, financial modelling of alternative deployments and maintenance renewal discount analysis. It is 100% web-based, cross-browser and drag-and-drop enabled. Both deployment and CSI data may be uploaded via CSV file, and future-state modelling is enabled via the Oracle product catalog and SPECint results for server comparisons.

Please contact me directly for more details on how to participate.

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Entitlement and Gap Analysis

Categories:

Compliance, Licensing, Rational IT Partners

November 22, 2011

Software licensing is both remarkably simple and immeasurably complex. Just like Calculus can be broken down into elementary steps, so too licensing is simple math stacked up over decades of disparate metrics and contractual terms. Even so, customers are contractually bound to compliance and Oracle is empowered to throw the book at misuse of its software.

Entitlement and gap analysis is the science of understanding products, quantities, contractual terms and policies. Steps include gathering data, rolling it up into meaningful information, making comparisons between entitlement and deployment, and assessing future growth, among others. This is the heart of Costimizer and the foundation of what I do as a vendor-independent consultant.

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Oracle Helping Customers Attain Software Compliance

Categories:

Compliance, Licensing

February 2, 2011

Oracle began publishing license information manuals for its database with 10gR1 back in 2004. In those days, life was much simpler and the licensing manual was a mere 26 pages.  The latest publication of that manual is 110 pages. Thirty pages of Oracle’s Software Investment Guide regard database-related licensing. Then there’s another 10 pages within a handful of PDFs covering specialty topics such as server partitioning, cloud computing, batching, high availability and disaster recovery. Granted, there is overlap and third-party rights among those 150 slumber-inducing pages of bed-time reading.

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Generic and Proprietary Hosting of Oracle Software

Categories:

Compliance, Licensing

January 31, 2011

Most of the time, customers use Oracle software for internal purposes on servers that reside within their own four walls. Co-locating those servers to a hosting facility makes no difference to Oracle from a contractual perspective. In both cases, standard terms and conditions within Oracle’s license and services agreement are applicable.

On the other end of the spectrum are generic and proprietary hosting arrangements in which the hosting or application vendor licenses the software. In these cases, Oracle requires that non-standard language be added to the order document designating the software to be used for third-parties’ business operations. Proprietary hosting refers to a contractually-designated application such as Salesforce.com. Generic hosting removes this restriction to include any database workload regardless of the application(s) riding on top.

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Oracle Configuration Manager

Categories:

Compliance, Licensing

January 26, 2011

While I’ve intentionally kept this site from becoming a technical resource for database administrators, I make somewhat of an exception with regards to Oracle Configuration Manager (OCM). Everyone from DBA to CFO to security officer should understand the implications of using OCM, which is Oracle’s E.T. phone home script that installs automatically within the database and reports usage metrics back to Oracle. If that doesn’t get your attention, then I recommend reaching out to my friends at Integrigy to understand how OCM may be breaching your company’s security policies.

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Server Partitioning Licensing Policies for Oracle, Part 1

Categories:

Compliance, Hardware, Licensing

January 12, 2011

Most database servers sit just above idle (much like your laptop while you read this blog post) making unused compute cycles a hidden cost within IT. A key component of saving money on Oracle, therefore, is to utilize servers more efficiently by increasing average CPU utilization to 75% and beyond. In other words, your goal can and should be to decrease the number of CPUs required to manage database workloads.

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Correction Regarding Nehalem-EX Cores

Categories:

Compliance, Hardware

June 19, 2010

I blogged back in March about Intel Nehalem with regards to sky-high Oracle costs associated with 8-core architectures. A few days ago, I was excited to report that Nehalem cores can be disabled in BIOS, satisfying Oracle’s hard partitioning policy. Simon Haslam commented that he was hearing differently, so I double-checked with Oracle and was disappointed to learn that Oracle requires BIOS disabled cores to be counted and licensed.

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