MentPro presents licence cost avoidance use case

The following is a typical use case where MentPro was approached by a client to provide cost saving recommendations on its current Oracle landscape. MentPro achieved this through a capacity optimisation and a right-sizing exercise.

The estimated licence cost avoidance in this case proved to be in excess of R15 million, a cost saving of 20%.

The table below shows the before and after scenario resulting from a review of the client’s Oracle infrastructure (Unix – AIX).

The licence model for this enterprise was based on a “per” CPU model, which totalled 80 licences spread over five IBM Power Systems.

The new CPU allocations resulted in reducing this to 58 required licences, a cost avoidance of 19 licences spread across the different frames.

The following steps detail the use case:

• In order to optimise and realise cost avoidance through right-sizing, a comprehensive analysis of each Oracle partition was undertaken.
• By analysing and grouping peak usage patterns by interval (ie, online/offline), relevant Oracle partitions could now be pooled according to peak processing requirements.
• The customer could not immediately migrate partitions from one power system to another because of change schedule limitations. The option was taken to pool selected partitions on the current host.
• Configured CPU values per partition was adjusted accordingly (up or down) to align with peak processing requirements based on the right-sizing analysis and findings. 
• CPU entitlement values were right-sized to allow guaranteed processing when required and release unused allocated CPUs into the pool for other partitions to use as required.
• The above methodology limits the number of the configured CPUs per licence within the pool by freeing up unused capacity within the pool while still providing sufficient processing capability.

Typical workload profiling

• An AIX partition has been configured with two CPUs (entitlement) and a maximum value of four CPUs.
• The partition has an average peak of 2.25 CPUs and has an average usage of 0.75 CPUs.
• Oracle will be licensed based on the maximum value of four CPUs.

Scenario:

Analysis of the environment:

The above graphs show two partitions that have CPU peaks in two different intervals, being online and batch.

The client’s licence cost

The first partition has been configured with four CPUs (entitlement) and a maximum value of six CPUs max.

The second partition has been configured with two CPUs (entitlement) and a maximum value of four CPUs max, thus totalling the licensing cost for 10 CPUs.

On analysis, the first partition’s online peak is four CPUs and the second partition’s batch peak is 2.25 CPUs. 

The solution:

These partitions can be configured to share CPU in a pool configuration of five CPUs.

This ensures the required throughput for processing, while reducing the amount of licences. In this case, five CPUs can potentially be reclaimed, ie, fit for purpose.

Value-added services:

IT infrastructure right-sizing

• Adjusting processing capacity up/down to optimise and streamline your IT environment to ultimately reduce opex and capex spend.
• An efficient IT environment allows for better planning and management of budget and infrastructure.

• Analysing and assessing a potential client’s IT infrastructure to quote for hardware replacements in accordance with what is required, as opposed to market-related behaviour.
• Proactively planning for future requirements based on historical utilisation trends and business demand. MentPro provides a dynamic solution in the form of capacity as a service (CpaaS) that can be scaled to suit the customers' long-term requirements.