Oracle makes up a magic number called a 'core factor' that determines license costs for a given platform. By manipulating that number, Oracle gets to favor one platform over another by making it cheap or expensive to license Oracle products on a particular platform.
Right now my IBM reps are trying to convince me that I can replace a 88 SPARC CPUs on couple E25k's with POWER on IBM hardware. They argue that with POWER, I'd have less than half as many CPU's to license, and the reduction in per-CPU Oracle license and maintenance costs will pay for the IBM servers.
To counter that, all Oracle has to do is change the core factor for licensing SPARC processors, making Oracle licensing costs on SPARC hardware less expensive than POWER or Itanic hardware. That would drive enterprise customers away from HP & IBM and toward SPARC, as the Oracle license cost for a given performance level could be manipulated such that the TCO on Sun is less than competitors.
Right now my IBM reps are trying to convince me that I can replace a 88 SPARC CPUs on couple E25k's with POWER on IBM hardware. They argue that with POWER, I'd have less than half as many CPU's to license, and the reduction in per-CPU Oracle license and maintenance costs will pay for the IBM servers.
To counter that, all Oracle has to do is change the core factor for licensing SPARC processors, making Oracle licensing costs on SPARC hardware less expensive than POWER or Itanic hardware. That would drive enterprise customers away from HP & IBM and toward SPARC, as the Oracle license cost for a given performance level could be manipulated such that the TCO on Sun is less than competitors.