Following rather dismal earnings for Oracle’s third-quarter, the question of its sales tactics versus the cost of its actual product portfolio have come into question.  Oracle’s facing disruption from new advances in software-led infrastructure, and it’s starting to show.  Yet the cost of Oracle database licenses accounts for a sizable percentage of storage TOC, Wikibon co-founder and CTO David Floyer told SiliconAngle’s Kristin Feledy during a NewsDesk segment last week (full video below). He provided a rundown of the numbers and detailed how CIOs can drive down overhead costs by buying into modern technologies.

Floyer says that from a cost per terabyte perspective, 70 to 80 percent of the budget is usually spent on Oracle software. There are one terabyte drives priced below $500, but overall one terabyte of storage will set an organization back by an average of $360,000 over the course three years. This number includes associated expenses such as software, the servers and networking equipment that are connected to the storage, and the human resources that are needed to manage it all.

How can organizations drive down costs? Floyer says that the key is making the most out of CPU power. Oracle licenses its software per core, which means that if the number of cores goes down, infrastructure overhead will follow suit. This can be accomplished by investing in flash storage, which is considerably more efficient than traditional disk solutions.

The hardware itself is not the only thing that sets flash apart from legacy storage. Vendors such as Fusion-io embed sophisticated software in their solutions to allow for Atomic Writes, a technique that makes it possible to handle data in greatly increased speed.

Floyer describes Atomic Writes as a “way of addressing flash not as a storage device but as an extension of memory.  And the key here is that instead of being around the millisecond, you’re down in the microseconds, a thousand times faster. And in addition to that, you only need to do one write instead of two.”

Floyer believes that in the future, technologies such as flash will help reduce the cost per terabyte to around $75,000. He advises CEOs and CTOs to focus on Oracle licenses “like a laser” and make sure that infrastructure is deployed and managed economically in their organization.

See Floyer’s entire segment below: