Vertica License Price and Return !

[adrian.oprea]

Hy all ,
My company and i , we are looking for a product that can give a hand in taking off some loads (big once)from OLTP databases! so we have stumbled on Vertica.
After some tests and studies for the last 2 mouths we have decided that we will hit our customers with our new product (is not our is Vertica's product).
Well all good and nice until the license price hit in !! And as everybody know there are not to many databases that run on more then 5 tb or at least we don't have to many !! or maybe none !!
Ok , so i will get to the point !! At what point does Vertica pays off !! And i would like to compare it with Oracle .
We all know Oracle license is yearly and is on top to core/proc/mem etc... ; Vertica on the other side it's license costs is up to TB use and i will bold this ROW DATA is not compressed data .
So the question is ! At what point(database size) would Vertica will be a good choice ??
This point can be let's say a 5 tb database ussing for 5 year vertica will bring you a benefit of XXX % in comparing it with ORACLE or SQL SERVER.
Good to remember Vertica has it support service at 21 % of total license purchase price.
I mean no offense to any of the company's cited in this text nor i am trying to promote none of them !! i am just looking for an opinion and please if any of my statements are wrong fell free to correct me.
I have no doubts that there are companies that implemented Vertica and done their market studies along with strong bench-marking tests, so fell free to share the knowledge.
As well i know this is such a general question with so many answers and opinions, all of them are welcomed!!
Thank you all !!

[nnani]

Adrian,

You have ti understand that Oracle and SQL server belong to OLTP category and Vertica which is a pure breed columnar MPP database belongs to OLAP category, so theere cannot be much of comparision between Vertica and Oracle or SQL Server.

Vertica licensing completely dependes upon the raw data that is being loaded into vertica and not the compressed data after loading into Vertica.

You have to consider x% growth per year whicle projecting the data size w.r.t next 5 years
Say if you have current datasize of 5 TB to be loaded inot Vertica,
If there is 20% groth of data every year ,
Then for the next 5 years there will be more 5 TB added to the current data sized
So you need to get a license of 10 TB from vertica while buying Vertica w.r.t next 5 years.
advantages : Because of the amazing compression feature of Vertica, You will seldom run out of space in the next five years, even if you go above 10 TB.
So I would suggest, GO FOR IT.

Hope this helps you.

nnani........
Long way to go

[adrian.oprea]

nnani... are you from Portugal ?? Nani is the name of a good Portuguese soccer player .. any way !!
Is true oracle,sql server = OLTP != vertica OLAP .But still they can reach the same purpose. I won't eliminate OLTP from my arch, but since oracle license is on top of processors use ,i can not think of a system running the amount of data i run only with oracle under the hood the license price will kill me. So i will lower the number of proc under the oracle license and throw vertica to do the heavy stuff (so the OLTP will still be in place).. as my problems are when i am running reports drilling into huge tables(this is where vertica should came in hand) + the hardware price should go down (because of vertica req- or at least that's what all the bench-marks show).
-so , will vertica license(21% support)(unlimited procc power) + oracle license(22% support)(less procc power) < better or not > OLTP oracle standalone(+ procc to carry my workload).
- since the reports and workloads run slow because of the amount of data needed to be processed i need a fast database engine to do this for me !

[billinder33]

A couple of things about the licensing:

1) It is correct that Vertica is licensed on the raw TB. At this time, the raw TB license covers every aspect of the Vertica software suite - any number of cpus/cores, advanced analytics, compression, partitioning, clustering, management console, R integration, UDx framework, etc. Many of these you would have to purchase separately in Oracle or other database systems.

2) Vertica scales linearly, if you have 10TB on a 4-node system, it should perform almost exactly the same as 20TB on an 8-node system. This makes the cost of scaling the system very predictable. Compare that to an Oracle or SQL Server system where the more resources that get added to the system, the less impact they have due to the inherent bottlenecks and limitations of row-oriented database systems (diminishing returns).

3) Vertica typically charges less per TB as you buy more TBs. Even after the HP acquisition, Vertica still operates very much run like a hungry startup and can custom craft very accommodating arrangements for companies that want the software.

4) Maintaining and tuning a Vertica system vs and Oracle system will require far less human resources, so there is an inherent cost savings in labor capital with using Vertica.

5) If it takes an hour to get an answer in Oracle vs a few seconds in Vertica, what is the cost of the time for the person(s) waiting on that answer? What is the cost to the business? Can the business leverage sub-second response times across vast amounts of data to build a new revenue stream?

6) There are some things at Vertica does well that Oracle and the rest of the usual suspects cannot.... running complex in-database analytics, crushing though massive amounts of click, log, or network data, in database R integration, ability to build User Defined loads, transforms, aggregations, scalars, etc, hadoop integration, and so on....


So Adrian, the answer on what is the break-even point may take in many of the factors I listed above, or more. Oracle's not cheap. Many of the 'free' solutions on the market are not cheap either, when you factor in the amount of hardware, software add-ons, BI Accelerators (cubes, caching, etc.), and human capital required to run these environments efficiently. You need to weigh all of these items in before deciding what YOUR breakeven point is. I would guess that for many companies, after weighing in all the factors, Vertica becomes very attractive even at 1 or 2 TB+.

Hope that helps!

[adrian.oprea]

That was a great answer !! Thank you!!!

You know i see so many white papers and presentation of Vertica !! But still i see no actual case study with $$$figures$$$ to compare cost reduction on licenses fee compared to other competing RDBMS .
If there 's any out there i would love to take a look !

thx again !!

[billinder33]

I have seen examples where Vertica has been between 2x and 20x cheaper than Oracle, based on the items already mentioned above (leveraging DAS in Vertica vs costly SAN storage in Oracle, labor, licensing, etc....).

That said, most vendors of any size and reputation will not publish these types of cost numbers due to the many obvious (and many not so obvious) possible legal ramifications. Contact your local Vertica sales representative and they can likely share with you some real-world use cases where Vertica was by far the cost leader against competitive solutions.

[adrian.oprea]

Again a great reply !!

I will look into all the aspect you have presented my with .
Thx again !!