Oracle Support Rewards: innovate on cloud and save on your existing support bill!

Our customers have been asking us for years whether there is a way to reduce their Oracle support fee and finally … here it is!

Like frequent flyer miles, you can now earn rewards with your usage on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) and use them to lower your support bill for on premises Oracle Technology. The bigger a spender you are on cloud, the lower the cost of your existing support contract – all the way down to 0!

Too good to be true? We wouldn’t be an experienced Oracle partner if we didn’t read the fine print for you! So let’s have a closer look.

1. How does it work?

1. You sign a new Oracle Cloud Infrastructure contract or you renew your existing contract. This should be an Annual Flex contract with a commitment for at least one year.
2. Spend OCI credits by running any workload in the cloud. At the end of each month you get rewarded 25% of your cloud spend in rewards, which appear in your portal.
3. When your renewal comes up for your Oracle Technology support contract, you can use your rewards as payment and lower your total bill.

Of course, if you buy your credits and/or support renewals through Exitas, we will take ownership of this process for you.

2. What is in the small print?

• Yearly commitment
  This offer only counts for a yearly commitment with an Annual Flex contract, not with Pay as You Go contracts.

• Oracle Technology products
  You can only reduce support bills for Oracle Technology products, like database and middleware and not for Oracle Applications such as e-Business Suite or Oracle Hardware.

• Support renewals
  You can only reduce the cost of renewals for existing support contracts and not for first year support which you buy together with the licenses.

• Reduce to zero
  Your support contract can be brought down to €0 if you spend four times the amount on OCI, but you will always have to pay the VAT.

• Subscription based licensing
  Subscription renewals such as MySQL, Linux and Java are not eligible for this program.

3. Examples

Let’s explore 2 scenarios where this program would kick in:

• Backup to Oracle Cloud
• Legacy environment on premises, rest move to Autonomous DB

3.1. Backup to Oracle Cloud

In this scenario we want to back up our databases to an off-site location.
The Oracle Database Backup Cloud Service could be useful for this, because it not only stores the backups off-site (as you would imagine … ), but can also be used to restore the database to a cloud guest.
Which is very useful if you have some physical damage to your datacenter, through floods, forest fires, or … a leak in the airconditioning.

Let’s say you have 5 SE2 databases hosted on 2 Oracle database servers.
Each database server has 1 processor socket.

The total size of all the databases combined is 2 TB and we estimate that we will need 20 TB of active (directly available) object storage for the recent backups and 200 TB of archive (not directly available) storage for the long term backups.

With the Oracle Database Backup Cloud Service, you pay per GB storage (active / archive) and for the object storage itself (active / archive).
Ingress network traffic is free for Oracle Cloud (and the first 10 TB/month egress as well), but when you want to use a private, dedicated connection to OCI to get a higher bandwidth you also need to add 2 public virtual circuits.
The fees for your network or datacenter provider will be excluded in this cost estimation.

As you can see, the estimated cost is € 1.346/month or € 16.153/year.
With the 25% accrual rate, this gives you € 336,5/month or € 4.038/year.

This amount of €4.038 can be deducted from your annual renewal for your on prem DBSE2.

Even if you never received any discount, at a list price of €3.457,69 per processor for support, you can more than halve your support budget for 2 processor licenses.

Or, an alternative look at your infrastructure: the actual cost of the Database Backup Cloud Service is not € 16,153 a year, but € 12.115. Sounds doable?

3.2. Legacy environment on premises, rest move to Autonomous DB

In our second scenario, we want to migrate our Oracle Database Enterprise Edition environment to the Autonomous Database service.
However, we also have a number of old databases – perhaps on non-Intel CPU architecture – which are still needed at this moment, but will be phased out in the coming years.
As such, the upgrade and migration cost is deemed too high for these databases and they will remain on premises consolidated on 8 CPU cores (4 EE DB Processor licenses).

Because the Autonomous Database Service allows bursting and transparent up and down scaling, we estimate that we will use an average of 10 OCPUs.
And we will allocate 25 TB usable disk storage.
As backups are already included in this service, no additional resources need to be provided for this.

We will also provision 2 1 Gbit private FastConnect circuits to allow a seamless integration between the Autonomous databases and our remaining on premises environment.

With the 25% accrual rate, we will earn € 2.958 per month or € 35.497 per year.
Almost nullifying the support cost of our on premises environment (per processor list price of € 9.385 * 4 = € 37.540), even lower if you received a discount when you bought the licenses.

4. Conclusion

This is a nice extra if you are looking to run workloads in the cloud and you have some on premises Oracle Technology environments with support contracts you still need. This might help create a budget for back-ups in the cloud or move entire workloads you didn’t consider before.

If you already use OCI and still have on prem support contracts, it is worth exploring whether you can save some money on those.

More questions? Want to calculate what it would mean for your budget? Wondering what you could spend cloud credits on? Ask us: info@exitas.be

Author: Freek D’Hooge and Goedele Lousbergh