Decrease Commercial Database Licensing Costs

January 28th, 2026 |
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Help decrease commercial database licensing costs using Intel® Xeon® processors with high performance per core.

By upgrading to servers with a higher performance per core, Intel IT consolidated commercial database cores by 82%—significantly reducing licensing costs—with a six?month return on investment.

Intel’s business is driven by data and informed by data-driven decisions. Therefore, commercial databases are a critical component of Intel’s day-to-day operations, forming the backbone for hundreds of online transaction processing (OLTP) and online analytical processing (OLAP) workloads, such as enterprise data warehouses, data analytics, and smart factory applications. It is crucial that Intel IT minimize database costs while providing business units with the database performance they require. That’s a constant balancing act.

Challenge:
Recent changes in commercial database and virtualization solution pricing structures have resulted in escalating software licensing costs. Projections from one database vendor indicated that these costs might triple in the coming months. These looming expenses motivated Intel IT to investigate how to reduce the number of cores used to run the commercial databases in Intel’s database-as-a-service (DBaaS) environment, without negatively affecting database query performance. Two options that we considered were rewriting applications to use non-commercial databases or transitioning to a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. Neither of these options seemed feasible because rewriting applications is time-consuming, expensive, complex, and risky; likewise, SaaS solutions don’t include licensing fees but instead come with their own high costs and often require employee retraining. We sought a solution that would create a cost-effective core density, deliver equal or better performance, and support quick and seamless migration to the new infrastructure—all while reducing total cost of ownership (TCO).


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