Home > Servers > Rack and Tower Servers > Intel > White Papers > Lower your TCO by selecting the right platform for your Oracle workloads > Oracle Database on IBM® Power® Systems, Compared to Intel® x86 Architecture
Administrators have multiple choices for the platform they use to power their Oracle Database deployments. Two popular options are IBM Power Systems and Intel® x86 processor–based servers offered by leading vendors such as Dell Technologies. Systems built on IBM POWER9 processors have a reputation for reliability and performance. But these systems run on IBM’s proprietary AIX operating system, and they require specialized IT skills to deploy, manage, and maintain.
In contrast, platforms powered by x86 processors and Linux operating systems are non-proprietary and are more commonplace in enterprise organizations. These industry-standard systems have hardware and management tools that are already familiar to most IT administrators. That benefit allows organizations to use existing and readily available expertise for management and maintenance.
Oracle Database licensing costs can also be a concern for budget-conscious organizations comparing platforms. Oracle Database enterprise licensing can vary by customer, but it is fundamentally constructed based on the number of cores in their systems times a “core factor.” The core factor for IBM POWER9 systems is 1, whereas x86 processor– based systems have a core factor of only 0.5, making the licensing costs half as costly for x86 systems built with an equivalent number of cores.2
The licensing core factor is compounded when deploying an Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC). Oracle RACs improve availability and provide horizontal scalability by enabling an Oracle database to run across multiple servers, while accessing shared storage. But each multi-core server adds to the overall licensing cost for the Oracle database— particularly when applying the 1.0 core factor to an IBM POWER server, compared to the 0.5 factor for an x86 system.
Overall, the systems powered by Intel x86 architecture (and Dell EMC PowerEdge servers, in particular) offer several advantages over proprietary IBM POWER9 systems, including:
On the surface, the benefits of x86 processor–based systems are compelling. But would these systems also offer a lower TCO over time?
To answer that question, Prowess compared cost factors, including capital expenditures (CapEx) and OpEx, between IBM POWER9 servers and Dell EMC PowerEdge systems built with Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors.
In addition, we measured Oracle Database online transaction processing (OLTP) transactions per minute (TPM) on two Dell EMC PowerEdge systems to determine how well performance scaled from a single two-socket to a single four- socket system.
We selected Dell EMC PowerEdge servers for the x86-processor-based systems in this study because PowerEdge servers are widely used in the enterprise, where they consistently maintain a spot in the top five for market share.3 Dell Technologies also provides management software, highly performant NVMe flash storage, and other benefits that add additional value for administrators making a full comparison.
2 Oracle. “Oracle Processor Core Factor Table.” October 2019. www.oracle.com/us/corporate/contracts/processor-core-factor-table-070634.pdf.
3 DataCenterNews. “HPE, Dell tops worldwide server market – IDC.” September 2020. https://datacenternews.us/story/ hpe-dell-tops-worldwide-server-market-idc.