Date: April 28, 2000
Software costs are often the most expensive component in a systems purchase. Software costs can vary dramatically between servers with comparable price/performance. This is because software vendors are moving to a pricing model that prices based on the performance rating: "MHz" X "CPU's". The higher the performance rating, the more you pay. This model favors SMP's with higher performing, but fewer, CPU's.
The attached report from Giga Information Group shows how significant the price difference can be. The report compares the Oracle pricing on a RS/6000 S80, a SUN 6500 cluster and a SUN UE/10000. Although all servers in this example have comparable performance ratings, the Oracle price on the UE/1000 is over double that on the S80 (Table 4). The total cost of the S80 in this example is 44% the cost of the UE10000, for a savings of $1.64M.