Introduction
A history of poor Oracle audit outcomes prompts the organization to take proactive license management steps
A regional electric company headquartered in the U.S. is a long-time Oracle user. Two decades earlier, an Oracle audit discovered the organization was out of compliance with its software license agreement. As a result of the audit issue, the electric company had to buy additional licenses and move to Oracle Database Appliance (ODA). They recently wanted an expert to review and confirm their compliance with Oracle licenses. They chose LicenseFortress to perform a Compliance & Optimization Review (COR) on the company’s 15 servers as proactive Oracle license management.
Challenges
Out of compliance for over three years
During the review, the LicenseFortress team found two major items that required 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.
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
Proactive management saved the electric company over a quarter million $$$ in licensing and back support costs.
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.
Cost Savings
A savings of over $367k
The Customer Today
More savings and a member of the ArxPlatform family
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.
