IBM, also known as Big Blue, is planning to develop a 24-core Power chip that will allow customers to exploit Oracle database licenses in a cost-effective manner.
IBM revealed the chip in a December 13 announcement, saying; “IBM intends to announce a high-density 24-core processor for the IBM Power S1014 system (MTM 9105-41B) to address application environments utilizing an Oracle Database with the Standard Edition 2 (SE2) licensing model. It intends to combine a robust compute throughput with the superior reliability and availability features of the IBM Power platform while complying with Oracle Database SE2 licensing guidelines.”
IBM’s increase to 24 cores will provide a significant capacity boost for Oracle-on-Power users who prefer a single-core server without having to pay more for Big Red’s database.
Oracle Database Standard Edition 2 (SE2) contains all of the features required to develop business applications. Despite its low cost, it offers industry-leading work-group scalability, availability, and security for OLTP and analytical workloads. According to the SE2, it supports relational, JSON, XML, spatial, graph, and unstructured data, allowing you to focus on building applications rather than worrying about how to persist such data. It can also be licensed on servers with up to two sockets. This is precisely why IBM will design a processor for it.
The sources for this piece include an article in TheRegister.