Calculating total cost of ownership

[sweetleaf]

Hi,

My org is trying to do a study of the dbms patforms we support. we're trying to see how much each vendor(sql, oracle, db2 on mvs) costs the company in terms of a few selected measures (db size, applications, MIPs for mainframe db's and cpu's for distributed).

Has anyone here had to do something similar? If so would you be able to comment on an approach or any sort of standard calculation?

Thanks.

 

[r937]

do your measures include the cost of DBAs?

many shops feel that this is the single largest cost of a database installation

r937.com | rudy.ca

 

[johnherman]

Agree with r937.
A well-qualified DB2/UDB DBA can be over twice as expensive as a DBA for, say, SQL Server.

-------------------------
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. - George Bernard Shaw

 

[sweetleaf]

Thanks guys,

Yes - general dba costs have been factored in. EEE and RAC dba's are easily twice the cost of other dba's at the moment. its tough though - bc quantifying 'people time' (eg. thru timesheets) can be difficult to link to db vendors(oracle, udb) in a direct way. Especially when the time tracking mechanisms are project not tool based. and you have hundreds of projects and scores of dba's worldwide.
But i agree wholly - 'people cost' most likely takes up most of the tco.

Thanks,

 

[ceh4702]

One of the biggest expenses on the mainframe is the cost of the OS and the maintenance Costs.

We went an alternate route we simulate our mainframe with emulation. There are no Machine maintenance costs. Some place in Florda was making the boxes. It is basically an IBM X-Server PIII based for lower MIPS for our VSE based IBM Mainframe software. It runs surprisingly well. This is one option if you are trying to just cut IBM Mainframe realated costs. You still pay for the Operatings system but not the IBM Mainframe Service Contract. It actually runs on top of a Server Version of SUSE that has emulation on top of that.

Some people at MSI Helped us on this:

http://www.msiinet.com/

We dont use it for database but there may be another emulator version for MVS as well.

If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.