Oracle Prices 9i RAC Clusters To Move

Oracle

The promotion, launched Sept. 30, is touted on Oracle's site and refers interested parties to an 800 number.

At the Oracle 9i database launch in June 2001, the company switched to the widely accepted per-processor pricing model, charging $40,000 per CPU for the enterprise database plus an additional $20,000 per CPU for Real Application Clustering (RAC) capabilities.

"E-business" discounts will be applied after the promotional discount, but otherwise this deal cannot be combined with other promotions, according to Oracle's site.

While competitors were quick to characterize this as a fire sale with Oracle reacting to price pressure from Microsoft SQL Server and IBM's DB2, others said the promotion is proactive.

"Oracle has no competition when it comes to scale-out capabilities. They're probably trying to drive acceptance and sales of RAC and this is probably the time frame they should be doing it in," said Mark Shainman, senior research analyst with Meta Group.

"A very small percentage of Oracle shops are using RAC but many are probably interested in it. What Oracle wants is to seed the market and convince customers that it doesn't cost that much extra to go with this option even with tight IT budgets," he added.

IBM is prepping a new version of DB2 to ship in late November, just after Oracle's planned Openworld conference.