Among the admirable strategies of Oracle is the simplification of pricing, especially with regards to hardware. Anyone who has tried to decipher the bill of materials for a server can appreciate Oracle’s move towards single SKUs. As painful as many believe software pricing to be, in reality, Oracle has also done a fantastic job of simplifying its licensing model to essentially two metrics. All this and list prices are publicly available. Who could ask for anything more?
Back to Exadata and the new Database Appliance. Simple Quote now includes hardware pricing for each that will auto-populate common software products. Make no mistake, there is still no pricing model for these appliances that includes the software. And it isn’t likely that there ever will be because of how much more profitable existing maintenance fees are than net new. In any case, choose a reference architecture, modify your software choices if necessary, and apply appropriate discounting.
Exadata comes in four flavors: full (with two 8-socket RAC nodes), full (with eight 2-socket RAC nodes), half and quarter. The new Database Appliance is essentially a quarter-rack with no Exadata Storage Software, hence the reference architecture designates no Disk Drives. Respectively, the hardware pricing is $1.65M, $1.1M, $625k, $330k and $50k.
From there, you sort of have support choices to make. For better or worse, Oracle has gone against the industry norm of offering several support options. That said, the price list has three separate columns including Systems, Operating Systems, and Data and Device Retention. The three columns add up to 22% of the machine price. If that sounds familiar, its because software support is also calculated as 22% of net license fees.
That’s really about it. There’s no price listed for having Oracle show up with a tool belt to help stand the thing up and configure it.
