Oracle Licensing – more examples of Why Accuracy matters
Andy Ellwood, iQuate
By correctly interpreting the complexity surrounding Oracle usage and licensing, iQSonar delivers accurate information relating to ALL aspects of an Oracle deployment.
This was illustrated by an engagement with a large Irish financial institution, in which iQSonar scanned Oracle on several hundred Solaris machines. One of the servers running Oracle Enterprise Edition had a single Sun UltraSPARC-T2 quad core processor. Each of the 4 cores had 8 threads. Under Oracle licensing policy this type of processor has a core factor of 1, so it requires 4 processor licenses. At current Oracle list price a one processor license for Enterprise Edition is $47,000, so the correct list price for Oracle on this server is $190,000.
The manual audit performed by the customer had stated that the server had 32 processors (as indeed did the CPU Highwater recorded in the Oracle database). Licensing for 32, rather than the required 4 license would represent a list license cost of $1.71m.
On another occasion, Oracle License Management Services were engaged with a UK Law Enforcement agency with unique security and operational requirements.
Owing to this complexity – and the size of the network (over 10,000 network devices) – various manual and agent based automated attempts to identify their Oracle deployment had not been successful. This increased the risk of non-compliance and of inefficient utilization of purchased licenses. These issues had also delayed the submission of complete audit data to Oracle by several months.
iQuate completed the audit in just five days without any network, performance or security issues. The customer now has an accurate view of their Oracle usage and was able to report their position back to Oracle LMS.
Finally, after performing a successful Oracle scan for a US based multi-national petroleum organisation across their global WAN network, iQuate was asked to use iQSonar to check some additional operational issues.
As part of their SOX-compliance guidelines, no default or “obvious” Oracle passwords were to be used across the organisation as this represented a significant security issue. iQSonar was able to quickly discover that non-compliant passwords were in use on 12% of Oracle instances.
iQSonar is the only third party tool verified by Oracle as providing accurate and definitive Oracle deployment and usage data
