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Comment by emcrazyone | Hacker News Reader

I worked at a Fortune-5 that was heavily invested in Oracle.

Oracle has a nasty licensing model where they charge you per core regardless of if that core is a physical one or not (hyper-threading). While I was there, it suites told all the engineering managers that Oracle was out and the going forward solution was Microsoft SQL which, as I understand, has more relaxed licensing model.

Another thing I'm wondering about is I would figure Netflix to be big enough to have SAN storage. Just about every large company I worked at always used SAN replication technologies instead of open source stuff. And it's not a debate about open source solution vs. commercial. It's more about support. Large companies want a throat to grab when things break bad.

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MS SQL used to be per socket pricing. With 2012 they switched to per core.

That was a sad day.

Does anyone happen to know how MS actually charges per core these days? I found: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Licensing/learn-more/brief-l... which points to http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=229882 -- taken together, it looks like AMD hex-core+cpus count at .75 cores, single-core cpus count as 4, and dual-cores count as 2. Given that you need to buy 2-packs, it appears you can get a single 2-pack for a single dual-core (hyper-treading appears to be ignored), 2 packs for a single single-core cpu, or 3 two-packs for 8 AMD cpus?

> Oracle has a nasty licensing model where they charge you per core regardless of if that core is a physical one or not (hyper-threading).

That's why you then switch to their T5 or M-series with up to 3,072 processors, and then Oracle comparatively charges you peanuts, since those systems have relatively few physical sockets. And if you know SPARC, and you know Solaris, you can squeeze some serious savings. The problem, it seems to me, is that most system administrators and managers today are neither familiar with SPARC nor with Solaris, so they end up paying more in the long term in licensing and maintenance for running something else like MySQL on GNU/Linux.

But that's their problem, not the guy's who knows SPARC and Solaris and how to save money, isn't it?

Netflix doesn't have SAN because it doesn't run anything outside of AWS. AWS provides the throat to hold in your analogy.

I was pondering about the netflix data center prior to the AWS migration. "Migration of Billing infrastructure from Netflix Data Center(DC) to AWS Cloud was part of a broader initiative."

Sorry, should have been more clear.

As a follow up. Many projects I was involved with did use Oracle replication but it was a rolling log file type that was purposely delayed to account for mistakes. Rolling replication happen across geographic locations while SAN replication dealt with the hot fail-over situations locally.

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