Oracle Imposes Oppressive Maintenance Costs on Sun Hardware Clients

Increased costs for non-mission critical environments

Since acquiring Sun nearly two years ago, Oracle has imposed borderline oppressive changes to the operating costs for legacy Sun hardware clients.

Within two months of the acquisition of Sun, Oracle made a sweeping change to the support model for legacy Sun clients.  Oracle mapped the hardware support model after its software support model. Only one level of service would apply to all of the hardware in an environment for any client that needed a new or renewed support contract for their legacy Sun hardware environment (both servers and storage).

For example, if a client’s production environment requires 24 x 7 support, then all environments require 24 x 7 with the Oracle model.  This had led to a radical change in operating costs for those non-mission critical environments.  Clients could elect for next day support, but that would apply, again, to ALL environments.

Customers prefer a variety of support options

Prior to the acquisition by Oracle, Sun offered a variety of support options for their hardware – sometimes referred to as the “Metals”.  Platinum support provided 24 x 7 support coverage, two hours or less to site, with live transfer of support calls.  Gold support provided 24 x 7 support coverage, four hours or less to site, with call back on support calls.  Silver support provided five-day support coverage (M-F) during working hours (8am-5pm), and Bronze support provided next day support.  There was also a T&M option (time and materials) for environments that did not require urgent or ongoing support, but more of an ad hoc support requirement.  This flexibility in support pricing allowed Sun clients to spend their operating capital appropriately, based on their own internal SLA’s for the respective hardware environments.

In addition, Sun had a policy that as long as the production environment had a support contract, non-production environments were allowed patch downloads for both Solaris and firmware, at no cost.  Essentially, those patches fixed issues with the OS and firmware, so Sun felt it was their obligation to fix them.

As a result of these offerings, many legacy Sun server clients had Gold or Platinum support for their production environments, and anything between Silver and T&M for non-production, which accounted for 2/3 of their hardware (Test/Dev and DR).  This was also true for the storage environments, brought into Sun from their acquisition of STK.  Many STK clients did not have 24 x 7 support for their backup environments, but had some type of support contract – usually Silver, but sometimes T&M.  Mainframe storage clients using the STK VSM solution would often have either Gold or Platinum support for those storage systems.

In most cases, prior to Oracle’s acquisition, Sun clients had 2/3 of their hardware environments outside of a 24 x 7 support contract. Now everything must come under Premium Support (if production requires it), along with the new cost structure introduced by Oracle for that level of support (22% of net hardware price – again, modeled after Oracle’s software maintenance pricing structure).

Oracle doesn’t get hardware

This radical change in operating expense, forced upon legacy Sun clients, contributes to the often-heard comment “Oracle DOESN’T understand Hardware”.  This change in support costs has continued, despite the loud objections by both legacy Sun server and STK storage clients.  In addition, it has provided a new opportunity for IBM to help make the business case for these legacy Sun and STK clients about the TCO benefit in moving to IBM.  IBM maintains a “Fit for Purpose” message for hardware solutions, but also the support contract levels (and costs) that go with those hardware solutions.  For example, IBM offers the following hardware support options to clients, compared with what Oracle offers to their hardware clients:

Legacy Sun and STK clients are seeing, very clearly, the sub one-year ROI they realize by making the move, including the costs for re-education and migration.  One large financial client was able to see a four-month ROI by retiring their older Sun SPARC systems, replacing them with IBM Power 770 servers using Capacity on Demand

Bottom line, legacy Sun clients aren’t pleased with Oracle’s high hardware maintenance costs and restrictive support policies, and are turning to IBM to demonstrate our lower TCO versus staying with Oracle/Sun for hardware solutions.

For more information

Please visit IBM tech support and maintenance services.

By Sue Klahr

Sales Executive

STG Oracle/Sun Competitive Tiger Team