How to Respond to Oracle’s Arguments About Bare Metal?

ByShaun Snapp

Executive Summary

  • Oracle makes the argument that bare metal is preferable in most circumstances to the cloud.
  • How valid is this argument against the cloud from Oracle?

Introduction

Now let us get to a second Oracle argument against AWS: a more direct argument for bare metal versus cloud.

Our References for This Article

If you want to see our references for this article and other related Brightwork articles, see this link.

Lack of Financial Bias Notice: The vast majority of content available on the Internet about Oracle is marketing fiddle-faddle published by Oracle, Oracle partners, or media entities paid by Oracle to run their marketing on the media website. Each one of these entities tries to hide its financial bias from readers. The article below is very different.

  • This is published by a research entity, not some dishonest entity that is part of the Oracle ecosystem. 
  • Second, no one paid for this article to be written, and it is not pretending to inform you while being rigged to sell you software or consulting services. Unlike nearly every other article you will find from Google on this topic, it has had no input from any company's marketing or sales department. As you are reading this article, consider how rare this is. The vast majority of information on the Internet on Oracle is provided by Oracle, which is filled with false claims and sleazy consulting companies and SAP consultants who will tell any lie for personal benefit. Furthermore, Oracle pays off all IT analysts -- who have the same concern for accuracy as Oracle. Not one of these entities will disclose their pro-Oracle financial bias to their readers. 
  •  

See The Following Article

“Let’s assume you own Oracle Database licenses and now with Oracles new “BYOL” (bring your own license) program, you can decide where to deploy those licenses. You can chose on-premise of course, but now can choose Oracle Cloud, AWS or even Azure. Everyone here I am sure has the perception that it will be far cheaper, easier and faster to run on AWS, right?”

“Well, take a look at this research report blog from AVM Consulting who actually consults migrations to AWS, Azure and recently Oracle Cloud. They just tested/Benchmarked running Oracle DB in Oracles BYOL DBaaS against AWS RDS. They ran an open source Database testing tool, SLOB, written by the (in)famous Kevin Closson, formerly of Oracle and now at AWS.

As you can see from the comparison tests on pricing and performance, there is just no comparison! Here are a few quotes from the article located here.”(see footnote)

“The results suggest that Oracle’s infrastructure (OCI) is between 7 and 10 times faster in I/O than the AWS counterpart, using only a quarter of the time to load the same amount of data. Furthermore, OCI outperformed AWS significantly in wait times for critical I/O events, which indicates a superior I/O latency on OCI. Finally, the TCO of running the system on AWS is twice as high as the bill would be if the system was run on OCI. Oracle’s performance dominance can be partially explained by the unique and differentiated capabilities of Oracle’s next generation Bare metal infrastructure, which is very different to the architecture of AWS”

AVM Consulting as an Independent Source

This is a study by AVM Consulting, which is pro-Oracle. Therefore, Oracle presents a study that is ostensibly from a neutral source when it is not a neutral source. The AVM Consulting study could be found on Oracle’s website!

Oracle was run on a bare metal configuration with NVMe SSD. On AWS, NVMe SSD was not used. Therefore the hardware is not equivalent. Oracle knew this study was misleading and chose to reference it and further imply that the source was independent.

The initial test case should state the following:

“Here’s why you should use NVMe SSD.”

Here are the problems with the AVM Consulting study:

  • The study does not hold the hardware constant.
  • Some issues undermine the comparison with the versions of Linux used.
  • This analysis breaks the question down between virtualization or containers and bare metal. However, there have been changes afoot that call into question this simple dichotomy.

Emphasizing Bare Metal

Oracle seeks to emphasize bare metal, and they are nowhere near as adept at containerization for the cloud as-is AWS or Google Cloud. Everything that AWS and Google Cloud offer is left out of the equation in Oracle’s analysis.

As of May 2018, AWS began offering bare metal instances. AWS describes when it makes sense to use their bare metal.

“These instances are ideal for workloads that require access to the hardware feature set (such as Intel® VT-x), or for applications that need to run in non-virtualized environments for licensing or support requirements. Bare metal instances allow EC2 customers to run applications that benefit from deep performance analysis tools, specialized workloads that require direct access to bare metal infrastructure, legacy workloads not supported in virtual environments, and licensing-restricted Tier 1 business critical applications. Bare metal instances also make it possible for customers to run virtualization secured containers such as Clear Linux Containers. Bare metal instances enable VMware to run their full suite of software, including vSphere Hypervisor, directly on EC2 managed infrastructure.”

Notice that AWS does not list performance as a reason for using AWS’s bare metal instances.

Bare Metal’s Disadvantages

In Oracle’s argument, they entirely leave out bare metal’s disadvantages, covered in this quotation from Denis Myagkov.

“In AWS I’m able to take any database as a service and logging system as a service and run my solution in production in a few months with a small team. With bare metal I will need a team of system administrators, database administrators, DevOps, managers to handle them… I will spend several months to settle the team only. With AWS I’m able to increase overall complexity of solution slowly and comfortably, while with SAP and Oracle it’s necessary to start immediately from bloody enterprise hardcore.”

Overall, Oracle’s argument is false in its contentions but leaves out all the other ways that AWS adds value to infrastructure. Oracle’s framework imagines database services like RDS as merely hosting or virtualized hosting, which is incorrect.