A Multi Grab Bag

CNET reported that Oracle “quietly cut software prices on some lower-end servers using multicore processors.” Here’s more from the article:

With the new pricing for Oracle’s lower-end Standard Edition and Standard Edition One products, the software company now is effectively matching Microsoft’s practice of pegging price to a server’s processor socket count and rather than processor core count. The move could cut the costs of purchasing Oracle database software by as much as 87 percent in some cases.

My previous posts on the topic generated some interest, so here’s the Oracle doc. And coincidently released around the same time as SP2 of SQL Server 2005.

Un-related to this, if you’re interested in the network access control capabilities in Longhorn, check out Adam’s post about NAP. In part he writes:

Admins have been crying out for this technology for years.  How many administrators leave work hoping that their clients are configured properly and that patches all applied without error?  Deploying NAP is a little like hiring a full time employee to do that worrying for you and that employee can fix the noncompliant machines he discovers.

At RSA, we announced that more than 100 networking and security partners have said they’ll support NAP when it becomes available. And they had demonstrations by more than 40 Microsoft NAP partners at the conference.

Have a good weekend,

Patrick O’Rourke