Larry Ellison: Oracle's going to WAR against Amazon cloud prices

Oracle technology chief Larry Ellison is embarking on a journey Microsoft couldn’t complete: beating Amazon’s cloud services on price. Oracle’s former CEO is reported to have kicked off a price war by committing his database firm to undercutting AWS on storage. “We are prepared to compete with Amazon.com on price,” Ellison …

[ratfox]

Join the club

That I understand, Amazon, Google and Microsoft have been fighting hard on this already.

Oracle fighting on price is going to be fun to watch.

[Tim Almond]

Um...

"AWS's Glacier storage starts at $0.0100 per GB. Then you add to this uploads and transfers to different AWS regions and out of AWS to the “internet”. Upload and retrieval requests start at $0.050 per 1,000 requests and transfers between regions at $0.020 per GB.

Oracle charges for storage plus data transfer: $0.026 a month per GB for the first TB and free for the first GB per month, going up to $0.120 per GB a month."

Can anyone explain to me how Oracle are 10 times cheaper?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's El Reg copy-pasting from the wrong section of the Oracle price list.

https://cloud.oracle.com/storage?tabID=1406491833493

Shows archive storage at $0.001/GB (indeed ten times cheaper than Glacier), retrieval $0.005/GB, plus fees for data transfer out, small transfers, and early deletion.

But for mostly-write applications this does look attractive. Depends how committed Oracle are to this business of course.

[Anonymous Coward]

Data retrieval and transfer out = $0.125/GB (39% more expensive than Glacier)

$1/TB/month to archive your data sounds great, but if it costs you $125/TB to extract it, you are never going to transfer the whole lot to another provider.

This means you are hostage to a classic "bait and switch". Just watch the storage costs increase in the next year or two.

[VinceH]

DaaPR - Data as a Protection Racket.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the Oracle we know and lov... er, hate

@AC; Bingo!

I had been planning on making a comment about how I wouldn't touch Oracle's storage with a bargepole, since they're already infamous for their modus operandi of locking people in and then squeezing them for every penny they're worth. ("Cheap" at first it may have been, since I guess one can't be too stingy when it comes to bait.)

The only question was how they were going to do it in this case... guess you put your finger on it. Or on *one* of the ways, at any rate...

[jabuzz]

Depends if you are going to use it for backup purposes then the costs to recover is to some extent irrelevant, and you switch to someone else by simply dumping your existing "backup" and taking a new one to a different provider.

[ajws]

Pricing data could be better presented

Would've been nice to separate out the storage and data transfer fees for Oracle like you have for Amazon... At https://cloud.oracle.com/storage?tabID=1406491833493 Oracle list their archive storage fees as being $0.001/GB/month vs $0.01/GB/month for Glacier, hence Larry's one-tenth of the price claim.

I get a different figure for total cost too. Adding the archive data retrieval fee ($0.005 per gig) and the outbound data transfer fee ($0.12 per gig up to 10TB, first gig free) to the storage fee = $0.005 + $0.12 + $0.001, $0.126 versus the "up to $0.12" given in the article. Would appreciate someone more clueful pointing out where I'm going wrong. :-)

[Anonymous Coward]

Tape-based retrieval speeds?

Did anybody see any information about speed of retrieval? That is a major limitation of both AWS Glacier and Google Nearline, but I can't find anything about Oracle's service.

FWIW I'm guessing this is implemented with StorageTek tape drives and some disk in front to provide the Object interface.

[JacobZ]

Google Re: Tape-based retrieval speeds?

Yes, obviously, Google Nearline is disk-based. However, time to last byte is much slower than disk speed because throughput is throttled. AWS is also disk-based but slow to last byte (and first too).

The question, though, is what kind of performance *Oracle* is going to deliver with its tape-based system.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Tape-based retrieval speeds?

Oracle will leverage Hierarchical Storage (formerly SAM-QFS), and will include tape. That explains the price, but even better, since for most uses it's write once to a fresh cartridge, your data is completely safe for years to come. Better yet, the archive is using Tape Analytics, so it's going to periodically check data integrity.

If you care for your data, Oracle is the only choice that makes sense and to be honest, Oracle should really be banging that drum.

Anonymous for obvious reasons.

[jibanes]

Haha, well maybe you should get rid of mike hurd and catwoman first.

[CAPS LOCK]

Going toe-to-toe with AWS on price?

Larry's a GENIUS!

[Anonymous Coward]

Oracle don't have customers, only hostages

So I'd put my (or any of my customers') data knowingly into his cloud?

Hell would have to freeze over first...

[Anonymous Coward]

One other point, as I understand it to do cloud backup you need to licence the cloud backup software which provides the RMAN interface. On AWS clound this includes the encryption option for free. On oracle clound this includes encryption and compression for free. Compression will give you near 10:1, at the source, so significantly reduce storage and network requirements.

Doing the analysis and tests to price this for a site is going to be tricky. And errors could be expensive.

[Moneyshotmike]

I'm a buyer....

I trust Oracle. I've never heard of them leading a customer awry.

[jonmoore]

Oracle would have to try to compete with AWS on pricing, because it would be hard for them to compete on the basis of functionality and features....