RE: ETAGON...

Well, I'm going to get involved here saying upfront that my company is a competitor of Etagon's, so I'm certainly biased, both about us vs. Etagon and RAC in general.

However, the financial savings of RAC can be significant - we do cost analyses all the time of RAC for potential customers, and its often as simple as:

2 mid-size sun servers (we'll say 16 processors) - $300,000 each = $600,000 a cluster of 5 4-way servers = $100,000
Cost of RAC per processor (list, even!) - $20,000 x 20 = $400,000

So, not taking into account the cost of clustering software for the two big sun boxes, the cost of downtime due to hardware failure, sun platinum support, discounted RAC licenses, forklift upgrades, and more expensive backup and other software licenses for larger servers - basically the simplest analysis you can do, RAC is still $100k cheaper.

If we do add in those other factors, RAC becomes even more cost-effective. Where some of those cost savings get eaten up, though is in additional complexity and administration cost - which is where companies like mine and Etagon find a market. RAC is hard, there's no question.

The financial savings in RAC generally don't come from the license costs (I can show how you can save on license costs, but we're straying into an advertisement for our product at that point), they come from improved availability and reduced hardware costs. Big SMP servers are exponentially more expensive than small ones, and the software that runs on them is correspondingly exponentially expensive.

Thanks,
Matt

--
Matthew Zito
GridApp Systems
Email: mzito_at_gridapp.com
Cell: 646-220-3551
Phone: 212-358-8211 x 359
http://www.gridapp.com



> -----Original Message-----

> From: ml-errors_at_fatcity.com [mailto:ml-errors_at_fatcity.com] On 

> Behalf Of Mogens Nørgaard

> Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2003 3:29 AM

> To: Multiple recipients of list ORACLE-L

> Subject: Re: ETAGON...

> 

> 

> Etagon invited me to come and visit them at their stand at the UKOUG 

> conference in Birmingham next week. Don't know if I'll have 

> time or not, 

> but in general I'm still looking for hard evidence of 

> financial savings 

> using RAC, ie a real comparison where switching to RAC (on whatever 

> platform) meant lower license costs in total. I've only seen 

> calculations where the price of RAC was omitted or hugely discounted. 

> I'm even willing to ignore the increase in complexity that 

> follows from 

> clustering and RAC'ing... One thing, though, that I will not 

> accept, is 

> this notion of TCO. It seems that anybody can use that thing to prove 

> any point, so it becomes hard to compare :).

> 

> If RAC is cheaper for you than non-RAC it must be because you 

> save the 

> $20K per CPU somewhere else. Or?

> 

> Mogens

> 

> Gunnar Berglund wrote:

> 

> > Hi all,

> >  

> > I would like to hear, if you have any experience concering Etagon...

> >  

> > Short review:

> >  

> > Etagon is an Israeli company and their product is Data Center 

> > Automation SW focussing initially on Oracle 9i RAC clustering SW. 

> > Etagon claims that their SW can produce fundamental savings 

> in 9i RAC 

> > installation and lifecycle management.

> >  

> > Please see their web site; www.etagon.com <http://www.etagon.com>

> >  

> > I'd be interested to hear if you know Etagon already and in any case

> > what is your take on their value proposition. Is 9i RAC 

> installation & 

> > maintenance a real pain point to you? And could Etagon SW possibly 

> > ease that pain?

> > 

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