Certainly, if
scalability demands exceed the capabilities of SMP machines, clusters or a grid may
provide the only viable solution. Clusters can prove cheaper through use of
???commodity??? nodes in RAC configurations. With careful planning and an enterprisecomputing
management style, such configurations do provide powerful and highly
available solutions.
Today, one of the key tradeoffs in determining the type of system to
deploy is the cost associated with deploying multicore CPUs versus
CPUs consisting of single cores. This analysis extends beyond simply
hardware costs since database vendors have adopted new pricing models
to take this technology into account. Oracle??™s pricing policy has
changed in reaction to accepted industry practices in this regard.
Many organizations purchase CPU-based licenses of Oracle based on
the number of CPUs in their platforms. However, where multicore
CPUs are deployed, the incremental Oracle license price is not at a 1:1
ratio with the number of additional cores. This is because platform
vendors and Oracle Corporation recognize there is overhead associated
with multicore technology, so Oracle license prices increase incrementally
based on expected performance gains.
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