Comparing GlassFish and OAS costs

I made a comparison in one of my previous posts that needs some corrections. So I'll just start the comparison from the beginning to avoid any confusion.

The purpose of this post is to compare, from an application server administrator's perpspective, GlassFish and OAS. Say we have 55.000 Euros to spend for a linux application server, hardware and software.

In case we buy oas enterprise edition 10g, its price goes to about 25.000 Euros per core (More like per two cores according to Oracle). So with 50.000 Euros we get a dual core (4 cores) license and with the remaining 5.000 we can get a machine with the best quad core in the market, and 8GB of memory. Let's assume that the rest of the hardware will be the same.

In case we choose glassfish, the oracle ADF Framework licensing amounts to 4000 Euros per core (per two cores). So, with 40.000 Eurow we get a 10 core (20 cores) licensing and with the remaining 15.000 Euros we get a machine (from dell's site) with 20 cores (2x6cores + 2X4cores) and 40GB memory.

With both servers we get clustering and support. And I need to add that glassfish community support is as good as oracle's.

It doesn't matter how fast OAS is compared to GlassFish. It may even be twice as fast (which isn't true). With those money and GlassFish one can buy 5 times more cpu power and memory.

And as a last stroke, I need to add the yearly support fee to Oracle. Instead of paying support and licensing fees, which amount to about 20% the initial cost per year. If we save this money, we can invest them in a new system every four or five years. (And the rest of the money can go to seminars!)

A clear win for open source and glassfish against oracle application server!