Executive Summary
A regional U.S. electric company, guided by the VP of IT, engaged LicenseFortress for a Compliance and Optimization Review (COR) to address Oracle license compliance issues from a prior audit. The COR identified costly risks in Disaster Recovery configurations and unlicensed Active Data Guard usage, which could have resulted in over $220,000 in audit fees. Through this review, LicenseFortress saved the company $367,000 by adjusting its Disaster Recovery server setup and switching to Oracle Standard Edition, significantly lowering its Oracle licensing costs.
$10K
Project Cost
$367K
Savings
3,570%
ROI
Challenges
The electric company, a long-time Oracle user, faced compliance issues two decades ago when an Oracle audit revealed licensing gaps. To address this, they were required to purchase additional licenses and transition to Oracle Database Appliance (ODA). Recently, seeking reassurance on their current compliance status, they engaged LicenseFortress for an in-depth review. The LicenseFortress team identified two critical areas needing immediate remediation.
1. After a previous audit, the electric company chose to run its Disaster Recovery (DR) environment on a physical server with only two cores. However, an incident required running production workloads on the DR server, and it was restored to the six-core configuration. After the workloads were returned to the ODA, the DR server was not changed back to two cores. The organization has been operating out of compliance ever since.
At a Glance
2. During that same incident, the ODAs were configured to run databases as a physical standby. During that configuration, four databases were opened for queries, which required the Oracle Active Data Guard license. The Active Data Guard usage was temporary, and the license was terminated.
Solution
The Compliance & Optimization Review revealed that the DR server configuration had been running out of compliance for almost three years. If Oracle had performed this audit, the electric company would pay $193,000 in back-license fees. This was for two database Enterprise Edition processor licenses, Diagnostics Pack, Tuning Pack, and Real Application Clusters plus support.
The Active Data Guard compliance issue amounted to $30,000 in total for six processor licenses for Active Data Guard plus support. All in total, the electric company had a compliance issue totaling more than $220,000 but would have continued to grow the longer they remained out of compliance.
Results
The customer was also looking for ways to save money through more proactive Oracle license management. They thought it could cut costs by looking at its current use of the Oracle Database Appliance and Microsoft Hyper-V. After further site and software analysis, the LicenseFortress team suggested the electric company stop using the Oracle Enterprise Edition and switch to the Standard Edition, which was a third of the price. Once the customer switched to Oracle Standard Edition, it used the savings to switch the Oracle Database Appliance to a physical environment on Dell servers. Pleased with the LicenseFortress team’s technical expertise, they joined the ArxPlatform as an ArxProtect customer, and continue to proactively manage their software licensing.
Avoid Costly Licensing Mistakes with Proactive Management
If past compliance challenges have left your team cautious, LicenseFortress is here to ensure your Oracle licensing stays on track. Ready to secure peace of mind and prevent unexpected costs?
Book a meeting today and discover how LicenseFortress can help you achieve lasting compliance and savings!
