At the end of 2019, Google announced an off-premises offering called Bare Metal Solution, designed to help customers begin migrating their workloads off of on-premises environments while also protecting those customers from additional license costs (e.g. from Oracle) that might be applicable in more traditional cloud offerings. Here is Google’s article about this offering.
Palisade Compliance clients are looking to move their environments out of their data centers but are often stymied by Oracle’s unclear licensing policies and aggressive sales and audit teams. This research note offers our guidance on licensing requirements for Oracle customers considering moving their Oracle workloads to the Google Solution.
ANALYSIS:
| Bare Metal Solution Configuration | Oracle License Requirements | |
| Dual Socket | 16 cores | 8 Processors |
| Dual Socket | 24 cores | 12 Processors |
| Dual Socket | 56 cores | 28 Processors |
| Quad Socket | 56 cores | 28 Processors |
| Quad Socket | 112 cores | 56 Processors |
Google Bare Metal Solution minimizes risks
The Solution minimizes the Oracle licensing risks associated with Oracle’s behavior towards other cloud environments by creating a very standard offering that limits your hardware usage to specific servers and cores. When using Google’s Solution, the customer brings their own licenses. Google does not resell Oracle licenses. The customer’s environment cannot move to other servers or processors outside of their predefined capacity. In fact, if the customer wants to expand their capacity, they must first log a ticket with Google and only then will Google add additional servers to the bare metal environment.
Building a solution this way minimizes risks associated with Oracle’s non-contractual soft partitioning “policies.” Palisade Compliance holds the position that licensing requirements for Oracle running in the Google Bare Metal Solution are the same as those when running on-premises in your own data center. Our position is supported by Oracle contracts detailing the processor metric as well as the core factor table.
On licensing in virtualized environments
While Oracle customers are often concerned about licensing when moving away from on-premises data centers, this solution can actually reduce licensing risks associated with these virtualized on-premises environments. Because Oracle contracts are unclear on licensing in virtualized environments, Oracle can use that lack of clarity to subject their customers to audits and huge audit penalties. Moving away from those virtualized environments to Google’s Solution can lower your Oracle licensing needs, reduce your noncompliance risks, and help you avoid additional Oracle costs.
Google’s solution a viable option
As it pertains to Oracle licensing, the Google Bare Metal Solution is a viable option for any Oracle customer looking to move away from on-premises data center implementations. This solution is constructed in a way that minimizes risks associated with virtualization while at the same time taking advantage of the on-premises 0.5 Intel core factor multiplier.
Information update
Read about Oracle and Google announcing a new partnership to bring Oracle database workloads to Google cloud (12 June 2024).
Palisade Compliance has helped hundreds of customers successfully transition to the cloud, including the Google cloud.
And you can always reach out to us for help with licensing Oracle in a cloud computing environment.
