“An estimated 70% of corporate technology budgets is spent on installing, updating and maintaining current technology “ as stated in New York times,april10,2012
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) includes:
• Acquisition costs
• Implementation and Deployment costs
• Operations and maintenance (O&M) costs for three years

Comparison of Implementation Costs
Implementation includes hardware and operating system installation, networking, configuration, database installation and initial performance tuning. However, this TCO calculation excludes database migration, testing or installing applications, which the research found variable among customers and independent of which hardware they utilized
For example, Oracle RAC is typically deployed with Exadata configurations but not for IBM, IBM would require additional HA failover software to match this key Oracle capability. Also, the IBM P770 was selected not only because it is IBM’s latest generation but also because it is one of IBM’s most popular models to date, and also one of the customers interviewed had specifically migrated from a P770 to Exadata
The average Exadata implementation takes just 59% fewer man-hours than a traditional IBM Power System .

Oracle Exadata
IBM P770

Labor*
49.4 man-hours
120.4 man-hours

$10,461
$10,603

All Exadata participants
All IBM participants had
Average Labor Cost* had used either Oracle used in-house labor

(@$255/hr) or an Oracle
(@$79/hr) for

partner (@$190/hr) for implementation implementation

Comparison of Operations and Maintenance Labor:
A comparison of operations and maintenance labor for the whole Exadata versus IBM P770 plus the Oracle Database solution shows annual 9% man-hours benefit from using Exadata, primarily from 40% less hardware systems administration time (server and storage) because of the integrated nature of Exadata. The Oracle database maintenance cost is the same for both Exadata and P770. Because the bulk of the man-hours in this category are for the cost of the DBA (see table below), it obscures the overall maintenance cost savings for Exadata. In addition, the TCO model includes outsourcing Exadata software patches for the first year only, bringing that function in-house for years two and three as customers develop comfort with bundled patches.

Oracle Exadata
IBM P770

Half Rack (48 cores)
48 cores/ DS8800 storage

Non- DBA Labor*
319 man-hours/yr
532 man-hours/yr
DBA Labor
2080 man-hours/yr
2080 man-hours/yr
Total Labor
2399 man-hours/yr
2612 man-hours/yr

$578,688
$619,044
3yr Labor Cost
(yr1 upgrades and patches

outsourced at higher labor rate)

Comparing the Acquisition Costs:
To compare acquisition costs, an IBM P770 solution was pitted against a Half-Rack of Exadata, with carefully selected configurations for each. Acquisition includes the one-time costs of purchasing the hardware and the software.

ORACLE Exadata
IBM P770

48 cores total
48 cores total

Processors/Disks
Price
Processor/Disks
Price

Software

48 Intel Xeon Cores 4 database servers with
(3) 3.3 GHz 16 core (48 cores)

Unit Price
12 cores each and 7 storage servers

Oracle Enterprise Edition
$47,500
24 processors
$1,140,000
48 processors
$2,280,000

RAC
$23,000
24 processors
$552,000
0 processors
$0

Storage License
$10,000
84 disks
$840,000
96 disks
$0

Total Software Price

$2,532,000

$2,280,000

SW Discounted 20%

$2,025,600

$1,824,000

Hardware

½ Rack Exadata w/high

Server Hardware Cost

$625,000

$443,000

performance storage

Storage Hardware Cost - High

w/84 600GB 10K rpm
$0
IBM DS8800 951 w/96
$2,387,000

Performance

SAS

600GB 10K rpm SAS

$625,000

$2,830, 000

Total Hardware Price

HW Discounted 20%

$500,000

$2,264,000

Total HW and SW discounted 20%
$2,525,600
$4,088,000

IBM P770 had connected their P770 to pre-existing NAS or SAN storage infrastructure to store the Oracle Database . However, Exadata includes storage, the comparison must add the cost of