Solaris 10 licensing costs

Though licensing prices have been lowered for Oracle products running with Sun's Solaris 10 partitioning software, this is not the case for Oracle software being used with other partitioning techniques, Woods said. Customers who create partitions using a variety of techniques, including VMware Inc. Here are the latest Insider stories.

More Insider Sign Out. Sign In Register. Sign Out Sign In Register. Latest Insider. Sign In Register. Sign Out Sign In Register. Latest Insider. Check out the latest Insider stories here. More from the IDG Network. Oracle execs talk up application plans. Sun president talks databases, Sparc and HP. While cost may be a key driver, 48pc of those surveyed felt that hardware obsolescence and modernization issues were contributory factors, while 39pc felt that support issues relating to UNIX was a concern.

Now, in reality, Linux is exactly what it set out to be: "a free Unix for the " - the distinctions this story appeals to got started as a cynical Red Hat strategy aimed at exploiting the ease with which people could port from one Unix to another to make sales against Sun instead of Microsoft, and have no basis in reality. Still, perception can become reality and everyone knows what Novel means here: that Linux on Intel is cheaper than Solaris on SPARC - and that raises a question: is what they mean any closer to being true than what they say?

There are four main cost groups to look at: OS licensing, hardware, application licensing, and long term operating costs. He's talking about Red Hat, but what he says is broadly true for other Linux releases, including SuSe: you can run either Linux or Solaris for free, but if you choose to pay for support, Linux costs more.

The hardware side of this isn't much harder to figure out. First, there's obviously no cost difference in the x86 world - your hardware costs don't change whether you choose to run Solaris or Linux because you can choose your OS after you get the hardware. So the bottom line on hardware is comparable to that on software licensing: for comparable performance levels, UltraSPARC is cheaper than x The software licensing comparison is somewhat similar.

First, if you're dealing with open source software the costs are the same - so the question comes down to cost comparisons across licensed products ranging from little known stuff like Maple and FrameMaker to widely licensed products like Oracle's database and applications. Most specialty product makers, including Maplesoft, are retreating from OS based pricing - meaning that the base cost is the same regardless of run-time environment.

Others, like Adobe, continue to support their Solaris customer base but don't yet have a Linux release. In both cases, however, a Solaris network license delivered via Sun Rays costs significantly less per user than wintel per client licensing for Adobe or Lintel per client licensing for Maplesoft.

Something similar is going on with enterprise class software. Secondly, for enterprise and related products Oracle charges per core - but CMT cores count for 0. As a result a four core x86 license costs the same as an eight core CMT license - and, again, the performance advantage makes the UltraSPARC cheaper - provided your performance needs put you into the hardware range where the benefit applies.