Have you tried turning server cores off and on again? HPE wants to do it for you from GreenLake

HPE has given its GreenLake cloud the power to control the numbers of cores that are active on servers and pay for usage depending on the number of cores a customer presses into service. The new service, dubbed “Silicon on-demand”, only works with Intel-powered boxes and uses technology that Chipzilla and HPE cooked up …

[Morten Bjoernsvik]

Maybe new on intel

IBM calls it Capacity On Demand:

https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/capacity-demand-users-guide

Same with oracle Exadata:

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E80920_01/DBMLI/exadata-capacity-on-demand.htm#DBMLI147

And Azure,GC,AWS,Facebook etc surely have this in their datacenters.

But this is becomming commodity:

[Snake]

Re: Maybe new on intel

Essentially "Lease the processing power level you require".

So they're pushing 1960's mainframe marketing, but we're expected to swallow it because it's "New and Improved!".

[P. Lee]

Re: Maybe new on intel

"You'll own nothing and be happy about it."

- World Economic Forum/Davos Billionaires' Club: "Build Back Better"

[Sparkus]

Re: Maybe new on intel

Yup, IBM has been doing on mainframe forever, iSeries (or whatever it's called now) for almost forever, and on Power (AIX) since at least 2004.

I think that DEC could do it on Alpha, but not sure.......

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Maybe new on intel

Yes IBM do it, but that's for Power CPU cores only (which these days mean boutique)

Yes Oracle do it with Exadata, but you can only run an Oracle database on that and nothing else (increasingly boutique as well)

Yes this is effectively how you pay for services in public cloud.

What about on-premises general purpose x86 compute? No-one does it in that space yet, so this is meaningful and interesting from that perspective.

I agree with the other comments that I suspect anyone wanting to use this to reduce their Oracle license costs had probably better lawyer-up.

[P. Lee]

Re: Maybe new on intel

Checkpoint used to do it for their firewalls. I'm not sure what the current state is.

[EricM]

Is this meant to be Oracle-safe?

As Oracle (among others) demads that all "installed" Cores must be licensed, Cores inactived by the scheme would still fit the description.

Other ways of soft-separating Cores from licenses like vCPUs (practically everything short of physical removal) are not accepted by Oracle outside of their own HW.

Legal counselling might need to be required before really calculating any license fees based on that feature.

[Paul Crawford]

Re: Is this meant to be Oracle-safe?

The best way to be Oracle safe is not to use them. Otherwise they have you in a financial gimp suit for Larry's pleasure.

[Dippywood]

Silicon-On-Demand

Too many cores for your wallet?

Ah, SOD it!