September 28, 2008

Oracle Exadata list pricing

The figures in this post have now been updated.  There’s a new spreadsheet at that link as well.

I’ve been trying to figure out how much Oracle Exadata actually costs. My first cut comes up with prices of $58-190K/TB (user data), based on a total system price of $5,322,000, and user data figures of 28 and 92.4 TB for the two available sizes of disk drive. But of course there are a lot of uncertainties in these figures. You can use this spreadsheet (Edit: That’s the old one) to see where the final numbers come from, and to modify the estimates as you see fit. Difficulties include:

*Oracle cites figures of 1 TB and 3.3 TB of uncompressed user data on its systems that have 12 x 300 MB and 12 x 1 TB of spinning disk respectively. That’s a 1:3.6 ratio, vs. the 1:8 ratio Greenplum quotes. Differences include 4% of Greenplum’s disks being used for hot spares (Oracle’s configuration doesn’t appear to include those, but I could be wrong) and another 4% being used for the actual software (Oracle provides other disks for that). Beyond that, there seems to be a basic 2X difference because Greenplum has an extra level of mirroring.

So how does Oracle’s Exadata pricing compare with other vendors’? It’s hard to be very precise. Besides all the other caveats above, appliance vendors have very different hardware configurations from each other, while software-only vendors can run on multiple different hardware set-ups. But all that said — and to a very rough first approximation — Oracle’s high-end price/TB figure is in the same ballpark as Teradata’s, while the lower-end figure is in Netezza range.

How Exadata’s query speed, throughput, and administrative effort compare to the competition’s of course remains to be seen.

So did I make any egregious errors? Do you think I picked the wrong options? Please say what you would have done differently in the comment thread, and suggest your own price numbers!

Oracle references used

Comments

10 Responses to “Oracle Exadata list pricing”

  1. Bence on September 28th, 2008 9:15 am

    The link to the spreadsheet is broken (500 Internal Server Error).

  2. Curt Monash on September 28th, 2008 3:07 pm

    Bence,

    I hope that was just a temporary glitch. It tests OK in two browsers right now.

    Thanks,

    CAM

  3. anonymous on September 28th, 2008 3:42 pm

    Curt, Oracle’s Exadata technical paper also recommends the Enterprise Manager Diagnostics and Tuning packs. See page 8. Those are $3500/CPU apiece, kicking the price up another $224k.

  4. Bence on September 28th, 2008 4:07 pm

    Unfortunately I still get the same error.

    Even pasting the link (http://www.monash.com/Oracle-Exadata-pricing-estimates-1.xls) either to Firefox or IE fails with 500 Internal Server Error.

    I sent the error screen to your e-mail address.

  5. Curt Monash on September 28th, 2008 4:22 pm

    Bence,

    Thank you for staying with this. I can’t explain the error.

    I’m emailing you the spreadsheet.

    Later on, I’ll update it things to reflect Anonymous’ comments, and hope that changing the spreadsheet’s URL magically solves the problem.

    CAM

  6. Bence on September 28th, 2008 4:29 pm

    I found the mistate, I believe.

    You have two links in the first paragraph. The one in the first line (titled ‘Oracle Exadata’) links correctly to the spreadsheet, meanwhile the second (titled ‘this spreadsheet’) gives the error.

  7. Curt Monash on September 28th, 2008 4:42 pm

    Thanks!

    I just found that error myself, and was about to embarrassedly post it. Fixing now!

    CAM

  8. Oracle Database Machine performance and compression | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services on September 28th, 2008 8:00 pm

    […] cited below received “half” an Oracle Database Machine. As I previously noted, an Oracle Database Machine holds either 14.0 or 46.2 terabytes of uncompressed data. This suggests the 220 TB customer listed below — LGR Telecommunications — got […]

  9. Exadata and Oracle Database Machine parallelization clarified | DBMS2 -- DataBase Management System Services on September 29th, 2008 9:18 pm

    […] to do with RAC that I’m wondering what RAC does to justify its >10% share of overall Oracle Database Machine pricing. In particular, different CPUs generally do not share RAM or cache when doing what Oracle refers to […]

  10. Curt Monash on September 29th, 2008 10:40 pm

    Anonymous,

    Right you are. The link is http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/bi/db/exadata/pdf/exadata-technical-whitepaper.pdf

    While the phrasing specifically mentions EDWs, those indeed seem like standard parts of the configuration.

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