On 6/24/2018 10:41 AM, Lawrence Stewart wrote: I was called in at the last minute to help a consulting firm who was having a hard time convincing their customer that they knew what they were doing. They spec'd out a SunFire 4800 cluster back in the mid 2000's that would run 10 or so medium-to-large OLTP and DW Oracle instances. I came across the notion of "Capacity On Demand" (COD) CPU licensing. You would buy a complete system, full of CPUS and memory, but only license a subset of the CPUs (and associated memory). The customer thought "great!" we can save a few $'s and if we want, we can turn on the extra capacity when/if we need it. After reading all the documentation, I was on a conference call with some Sun engineers, the sales rep, and my customer's team (including some of the consultants who were a little too "wet behind the ears". I point-blank asked the engineers: "I see in the documentation that if you use COD, memory interleaving is turned off, which only makes sense. Since we're only licensing 3 of every 4 CPU, Doesn't that mean we're only going to get half if not one quarter of the platform's advertised memory bandwidth?" (Single vs. two-way vs. four-way interleaving. Odd number of CPUs, no interleaving). Reluctantly, one of the engineers agreed that was indeed the case. The other "engineers" had no freakin' clue, but muttered something about "we have to remember that for next time". I roughly calculated the difference in my head and said: "For an extra 2% of the entire project cost (IBM Shark, Oracle licenses and Sun hardware combined), we're going to hobble these systems that much?". After the consulting firm I was sub-contracting for balked on telling the customer about this extra cost, I mentioned this in the presentation for the customer's CIO. She perked up her ears and immediately said 'We'll spend the extra for that much performance. What were you guys thinking?'" (referring to the original consulting firm's own "Sun expert" who I'd had a lot of arguments with, actually quit the day they signed the contract with Sun). I wonder, to this day, how many Sun customers were sold this COD concept only to suffer through 1/2 or 1/4 the memory bandwidth. This was for the entire SunFire 3800/4800/4810/6800/E12K/E15K line. I went on to support that system for 5 more years as the customer wouldn't let the consulting firm even THINK of letting me leave ;) art k.