ITG Executive Summary

October 2009

VALUE PROPOSITION FOR IBM POWER SYSTEMS SERVERS: VIRTUALIZATION IMPACT FOR ORACLE SYSTEM INFRASTRUCTURES IN MIDSIZE ORGANIZATIONS
Challenges and Opportunities
The challenges facing midsize businesses have never been greater. Changing market and competitive environments, the growing impact of globalization and mounting economic pressures are affecting most industries and geographies. To meet these challenges, midsize businesses are adopting IT solutions and strategies that were once the domain of their Fortune 500 counterparts. Advanced enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management and a wide range of other latest-generation applications are being deployed by progressively smaller organizations. Midsize businesses are also deploying solutions that treat information as a high-value resource to build competitive advantage and operating efficiency. Business intelligence (BI), enterprise performance management (EPM) and other informational tools form a key new sector of the IT landscape. As these shifts occur, midsize businesses are confronting issues that were once faced only by large corporations. They include dealing with mounting system interoperability; rapid database growth; and the need to maintain required levels of performance, availability and security for increasingly complex and interdependent IT environments. If these challenges can be mastered, however, new opportunities emerge to exploit technological change to achieve new forms of organizational dynamism and competitive differentiation. Midsize businesses are structurally less complex than their corporate counterparts, and business models tend to be more focused. The potential for technology-driven transformation is greater. For many midsize businesses, Oracle solutions will play a critical role in enabling them to meet the challenges, and to realize the opportunities that transformation represents. The companys broad range of technology and application solutions offer the potential to create enterprise-class IT environments in organizations of any size. However, the effectiveness of these will depend in no small measure on the server infrastructures that support them. At a time of budgetary pressures, these must not only deliver high levels of performance and quality of service, but must also minimize infrastructure complexity and contain costs. This report deals with a platform the IBM Power Systems server that may play a critical role in achieving all of these objectives.

This ITG EXECUTIVE SUMMARY is based upon results and methodology contained in a Management Brief released by the International Technology Group.

Server-related Costs
Cost Comparisons Industry-leading system-level performance, highly granular virtualization, closely integrated system and workload management capabilities, and sophisticated energy efficiency features make the Power Systems server platform a highly cost-effective alternative to UNIX competitors. This is demonstrated by three examples presented in this report. Costs for use of IBM Power Systems servers, the AIX operating system and PowerVM virtualization technologies average 48 percent less than those for use of HP Integrity servers with HP-UX and the HP Virtual Server Environment (VSE), and 54 percent less than those for use of Sun M, X and T series servers with the Solaris operating system and Sun virtualization technologies for these platforms. Three-year server-related costs are compared for use of different server platforms and virtualization technologies to support new deployments of Oracle solutions in midsize financial services, manufacturing and retail companies. Figure 1 illustrates these results. Figure 1 Three-year Server-related Costs for New Oracle Solution Deployments: Averages for All Installations

Oracle software employed in comparisons included Oracle 11g databases, Real Application Clusters (RAC) and management tools; JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, E-Business Suite (EBS), PeopleSoft Enterprise, and Siebel ERP and CRM systems; Oracle banking and retail applications; Essbase; Oracle Business Intelligence Enterprise Edition (OBIEE); and Oracle Application Server and WebLogic Suite. Comparisons also include custom and third-party applications using Oracle 11g databases. Three-year costs include those for server hardware acquisition and maintenance; license and support costs for operating systems, virtualization and high availability (HA) solutions and system management tools; personnel costs for system administration and related functions; facilities primarily energy costs; and license and support costs for Oracle software. Hardware, maintenance and software license and support costs for all platforms were calculated using discounted street prices. Details of installations and configurations, along with methodology and assumptions employed and cost breakdowns, may be found in the Detailed Data section of this report. The inclusion of Oracle license and support costs reflects an important variable in the overall cost picture. Where Oracle software costs are determined by per processor pricing, the ability to achieve high levels of concentration has a significant bottom-line impact. Fewer processors mean lower costs.

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Cost Differentiators Industry benchmarks as well as user experiences confirm that Power Systems servers outperform HP and Sun equivalents with the same number of cores by two to three times. The Power Systems server advantage is reinforced by significantly greater hard partition granularity. IBM logical partitions (LPARs) may be configured in increments as small as 1/100th of a core. In comparison, HP nPartitions (nPars) may be configured only in increments of eight cores, and Sun Dynamic Domains can be configured in increments of 4 or 16 cores. The result is a level of hard partitioning granularity up to 400 or 800 times greater than for HP and Sun equivalents respectively. LPARs are supported on all Power Systems server models. However, HP nPars are supported only on larger Integrity Superdome, rx8640 and rx7640 models, and Sun Dynamic Domains are supported only on SPARC64-based M series models. Hard partitioning is not supported for Sun T and X series servers. All three vendors also offer soft partitioning technologies. However, there are significant limitations to these, and they tend to be employed for light-duty production and non-production instances. Hard partitions are typically preferred for systems that are performance-sensitive, business-critical or both. The combination of higher per core performance and greater hard partition granularity enables Power Systems servers to handle the same Oracle workloads with numbers of cores that are by wide margins less than for competitive platforms. In the retail company installation, for example, three Power Systems servers with 16 POWER6 cores handle the same Oracle workloads as six Integrity servers with 48 Itanium2 cores. Figure 2 illustrates these configurations. Figure 2 Integrity and Power Systems Server Configurations for Retail Company Installation
INTEGRITY SERVERS
rx7640 12 cores 2 nPars rx7640 12 cores 2 nPars

rx6600 8 cores

rx6600 8 cores

rx2660 4 cores

rx2660 4 cores

POWER SYSTEMS SERVERS

Power 550 8 cores 5 LPARs Power 550 4 cores 2 LPARs Power 520 4 cores 2 LPARs

The Sun configuration for this installation included seven M, X and T series servers with a combined total of 108 cores. Lower numbers of Power Systems server cores in all three installations more than outweigh differences in Oracle per core pricing. The Oracle pricing model currently counts a POWER6 core as 1.0 for pricing purposes, while other RISC cores are counted as 0.75, x86 cores as 0.5 and Sun T1 cores as 0.25.

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Because of the higher levels of consolidation, however, Oracle software costs for Power Systems server configurations are lower than for Integrity and Sun platforms. A number of other factors contribute to lower Power Systems server costs. For example, AIX system and workload management capabilities are not only highly granular, but also tightly integrated with PowerVM partitioning mechanisms. The implications are important. Partitioning creates the potential for high levels of capacity utilization. However, the extent to which this will occur in practice depends heavily on the mechanisms that allocate system resources between, and monitor and control workload execution processes across partitions. If these mechanisms are ineffective, a high proportion of system capacity may be idle at any given time. HP also, through its VSE offering, provides close integration of virtualization and management capabilities. However, Sun offerings are significantly weaker in this area. In the comparisons presented in this report, capacity utilization is lower than for Power Systems and Integrity server platforms. UNIX and x86 Platforms As these examples suggest, not only performance, but also virtualization capability have become critical differentiators among UNIX servers. This is also the case in comparing UNIX servers with x86 platforms running Microsoft Windows server operating systems and Linux variants such as Oracle Enterprise Linux and Red Hat and SUSE (Novell) distributions. Even where x86 servers deliver high levels of raw performance, they remain dependent on use of soft partitioning techniques such as Microsoft Hyper-V, Oracle VM, VMware and Xen to achieve consolidation of multiple operating system and application images. Use of such techniques, however, imposes certain constraints. It may be possible to concentrate comparatively small development, test and other non-production instances, or light-duty production instances on a single x86 Windows or Linux server. It is, however, a great deal more difficult to apply soft partitioning to the kinds of large-scale, business-critical production instances for which hard partitioning is routinely employed on UNIX servers. These constraints also, it should be noted, tend to apply to UNIX software-based partitioning techniques such as HP Virtual Partitions (vPars) and Integrity Virtual Machines (IVMs), IBM Workload Partitions (WPARs) and Sun Containers/Zones and Logical Domains (LDOMs), which are discussed in more detail later in this report. They are inherent to any form of software-only partitioning.

Costs of Obsolescence
As the comparisons presented above indicate, Power Systems servers represent a significantly lower-cost alternative to HP Integrity and Sun Solaris platforms for new deployments of Oracle solutions. However, at a time when many organizations are experiencing budgetary pressures, there may appear to be a strong argument for avoiding new server investments. However, retaining obsolete server technology may perpetuate inefficiencies that result in unnecessarily high costs. Older server models are inevitably less powerful than their modern counterparts. They may lack virtualization capability, or may implement only limited forms of partitioning. System and workload management tools may be more rudimentary, and energy consumption is higher. UNIX server virtualization capabilities have seen major advances since the mid-2000s. If these capabilities are properly exploited, server consolidation enables organizations to reduce physical server administration and energy costs. The number of cores required to support Oracle solutions may also be materially reduced, with corresponding savings in license and support costs.
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These and other savings may more than justify new server investments. This may be illustrated by a second set of cost comparisons. These involve inefficient scenarios for the same three installations based on use of older HP, IBM and Sun servers. Three-year costs for these scenarios include hardware maintenance, support for systems software as well as Oracle solutions; personnel costs for system administration and related functions; and facilities costs. Calculations do not include hardware acquisition or new software licenses. Inefficient scenario costs are compared with three-year costs for use of new Power Systems servers. Power Systems server costs are the same as for the first set of comparisons, except that Oracle licenses are not included it is assumed that existing licenses are transferred to new Power Systems platforms. Results are summarized in figure 3. Figure 3 Three-year Server-related Costs for Inefficient Scenarios and Use of IBM Power Systems: Averages for All Installations

Three-year costs for use of new Power Systems servers average 55 percent less than for inefficient scenarios; i.e., costs are less than half. Savings in maintenance, software support, system administration personnel and facilities offset costs of new technology platforms. In practice, if organizations were moving from another vendors platforms to Power Systems servers, it would also be necessary to allow for migration costs. These would typically include software and data conversion, staff retraining, and installation, assurance and start-up of new servers and systems software. The point is nevertheless demonstrated technological obsolescence may carry a major cost penalty and, over time, this may be significantly greater than the costs of upgrading server infrastructures.

Conclusions
The next few years will be challenging ones for Oracle users in midsize organizations. Not only must they deal with a difficult business climate, but they must also master the growing breadth and complexity of the Oracle solution portfolio, and contain the cost inflation that may all too easily accompany deployment of new tools and technologies. Other trends, including growth in database sizes and mounting pressures for higher levels of availability, complicate the tasks faced by IT departments. The right server choices can play a major role in enabling organizations to meet these challenges. Although debates about processing power and the impact of commodity platforms and scale-out strategies tend to dominate industry discussions, the main area of server innovation has been in virtualization. More than any other technology available today, virtualization has the potential to reduce IT complexities and to achieve breakthrough improvements in cost-effectiveness within IT infrastructures.
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The leader in server virtualization is, unquestionably, the IBM Power Systems server platform. The potential exists to realize new levels of granularity in consolidation of database and application instances and to improve the efficiency with which all system resources are used to support growing, increasingly diverse workloads. That potential should be a critical factor in any server selection process. The Power Systems server platform has certain additional advantages. It is the recognized industry leader in performance, system and workload management, availability optimization industry surveys have repeatedly shown that Power Systems servers with the AIX operating system typically deliver higher levels of uptime than competitive UNIX and x86 platforms as well as energy efficiency and other areas. As the research undertaken for this report indicates, there is no cost penalty for these capabilities. In fact, the reverse is the case. There are important opportunities for cost savings. Time, perhaps, to review server strategies and platform commitments.

Additional Information
This ITG Executive Summary is based upon results and methodology contained in a Management Brief released by the International Technology Group. For copies of this Management Brief, please email requests to info-itg@pacbell.net.

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Copyright 2009 by the International Technology Group. All rights reserved. Material, in whole or part, contained in this document may not be reproduced or distributed by any means or in any form, including original, without the prior written permission of the International Technology Group (ITG). Information has been obtained from sources assumed to be reliable and reflects conclusions at the time. This document was developed with International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) funding. Although the document may utilize publicly available material from various sources, including IBM, it does not necessarily reflect the positions of such sources on the issues addressed in this document. Material contained and conclusions presented in this document are subject to change without notice. All warranties as to the accuracy, completeness or adequacy of such material are disclaimed. There shall be no liability for errors, omissions or inadequacies in the material contained in this document or for interpretations thereof. Trademarks included in this document are the property of their respective owners.

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