2011-08-24
Why we have a problem with Oracle's Solaris support pricing
The way I've come to think about Oracle's prices for Solaris support is that it is effectively increasing the price of the machine by 8% (or 12% if you want hardware support) per year that you keep it. Whether this matters depends on the sort of environment that you have.
In some organizations, the hardware costs are a small part of the total cost of operating a machine, and if not they're a small part of the value that the machine contributes to your bottom line (this includes a lot of the sort of environments that Oracle traditionally sells to). Even if this is not so, I believe that many organizations turn over production machines relatively frequently for various reasons; at a three year lifespan a Solaris support contract only increases the machine's hardware cost by a bit less than a quarter, which may be considered cheap.
(This relatively short lifespan is true even of some machines here in the department; as you might expect, research compute clusters age quite fast. This year's cutting edge server is not even really worth the heat from keeping it powered on in a few years.)
Universities are in many ways the worst case for this pricing model. We tend to run machines for a very long time (five years is on the low end) and the hardware cost is usually the only cost of the machine, since we generally don't have expensive licensed software and the like. And of course universities have no return on investment; these machines don't make us any money, they're a pure cost sink. With a many year lifespan and essentially no other costs, the extra cost added by Solaris support adds up rapidly. If we run a Solaris server for six years on the same hardware (which is perfectly normal around here), the server costs us almost half again as much as its sticker price. Or to put it the other way, we get two servers instead of three.
(Of course we're being thrifty by not replacing hardware very often. But once you start thinking that way, you wind up having to ask if we could be even more thrifty by not running Solaris at all.)
In however many years from now when our current hardware starts being either flaky or inadequate we may wind up concluding that Solaris really is worth it and that it lets us save one machine out of every three (or more). But I honestly think that it's going to be a hard sell, because it's hard to see how Solaris is that good.
(Or maybe we'll have a real hardware budget at that distant future time. In a university environment, one can always dream.)
2011-08-23
Reading the tea leaves about Oracle, Solaris, and universities
I've mentioned before that the university had a long-standing general support agreement for Solaris and that the yearly renewal of that agreement this year was going to be interesting. I honestly wasn't very optimistic, mostly due to Oracle's reputation around money issues (as in, they want as much of yours as possible) and partly due to the abrupt termination of Sun's long-standing academic discounts for other things.
Well, 'renewal' time has come and gone around here, and I have bad news and good news. The bad news is simple: Oracle doesn't do university-wide Solaris support agreements, and it doesn't appear to do university discounts on support at all. The university gets to pay the same rate for patch access as everyone else; OS level support for Sun and Oracle hardware is the standard 8% of the hardware purchase cost per year.
Well, sort of. The good news is that Oracle understands that this is kind of an unpleasant change for universities to swallow (or so I am assuming), so they had a special one-time only transition plan for existing machines that were being covered by an old Sun campus agreement. This plan gave such machines inexpensive patch coverage at a rate basically the same as we were paying on a per-machine basis under the old support agreement. However, we had only one opportunity to enroll machines under this plan and they had to be existing, already purchased machines; now that the transition is done, that's it, all future machines pay the full 8% a year.
While I'm glad that Oracle is not simply throwing us to the wolves, the result is a bit divided. We can continue to run existing Solaris installs, but adding new ones would be quite expensive. And sooner or later people's current hardware will break or need replacement, at which point it also becomes expensive. On the whole it seems that Oracle is being kind enough not to throw us to the wolves immediately but is also making it clear that they are not especially interested in us in the long term.
(This is not particular to universities; Oracle doesn't seem to be interested in what I could call the 'small money' sector in general, based on their prices, disinterest in discounts, and so on.)