The Relative Cost of Application Servers

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Eric Stahl's Blog | July 27, 2005   8:27 AM | Comments (14)

Someone once asked me "Why pay for WebLogic when there are free and lower cost alternatives out there?" It is a valid question, particularly now, as we see free products from the open source community and the mega vendors giving their products away.

To answer this question I came up with a crude cost/benefit analysis that shows that application server license and support costs are a small fraction of the total project cost, yet can significantly affect the cost, time and risk of the project. Free and low cost alternatives may appear to reduce cost up front, but can backfire by needing more hardware, software and labor to achieve the same result.

Product and Support Costs

The two cost categories of any project are product costs (hardware, software and support) and implementation costs (design, development, maintenance and management). The former is relatively easy to get data on while the latter is much more difficult because it depends on the type of application being built, who is building it and many other factors.

If you look into the full disclosure note in an audited SPECjAppServer2002 benchmark you can get pricing information for all of the hardware, software and support for the core stack of products needed to run an application.

BEA/HP results from February 2005: This configuration has WebLogic Server 8.1 running on a single server powered by four Itanium2 processors running RedHat Enterprise Linux 3. The database is Oracle9i Database Release 2, Standard Edition v9.2.0.4 on a single server powered by four Itanium2 processors running HP-UX 11i. The system is processing 1,710 transactional operations per second (TOPS).

If you dig into the pricing disclosure you see the following breakdown;

Total Hardware, Software and 3 Years of 24x7 Support Cost: $197,914

Total Hardware and O/S: $137,661

App Server Hardware: $59,499
Database Server Hardware: $63,723
Storage: $13,676
Misc Hardware: $763

Total Software: $60,280

WebLogic Licenses: $16,000
WebLogic Support: $10,800
Oracle RDBMS Licenses: $30,000
Oracle Support: $4,200

All of this information is available here.

WebLogic Server licenses and three years of 24x7 support cost $26,800 out of $197,914, making it $13.5% of the total system cost.

Labor Costs

Now we need to take a swag to get into the general ballpark for labor costs. I will make a conservative assumption that an application consumes four people per year to design, develop, maintain and manage. If we figure $100k per person the three year labor cost is $1.2M (3 years x 4 people x $100k/year).

Adding labor costs back to our total, we come up with a total project cost of $1,397,914.

The fact is that labor is by far the largest cost component of any project, at about 85%, with only 15% accounting for product and support costs.

Backing the application server cost ($26,800) out of the total, we find that the application server licenses and three years of support only account for about 2% of the total project cost.

If you use 2% as a general stake in the ground, one has to ask what happens to these costs if trade offs are made in the application server software?

How WebLogic Pays for Itself

A small increase in the need for more hardware could easily offset the savings achieved by a free application server. Many WebLogic customers justify the cost of WebLogic on this basis alone. If you look at the SPECjAppServer2002 data it is clear that WebLogic, even with a higher license and maintenance price/CPU, costs less per transaction than IBM and Oracle because it requires less hardware and fewer software licenses (and the resulting support costs that go along with both of them). JBoss has not published any benchmark data so it is difficult to say how much hardware it would require to process the same number of transactions or users as WebLogic. Note that WebLogic has the world record for the lowest price/performance in both the DualNode and MultiNode categories.

More importantly, what about that much larger piece of the cost equation, the labor costs? Increases in developer and administrator productivity have the largest effect on project cost, even if my assumptions were off by an order of magnitude.

WebLogic helps increase developer productivity in a number of ways. First, it's about providing as many out-of-the-box infrastructure features as possible to reduce the amount of coding that is needed to build and maintain a complex enterprise application. This goes well beyond J2EE features. It includes portal, personalization, caching, clustering, management, security, business process management, adapters and many other features needed by most applications. By leveraging packaged middleware to create a personalized portal user interface, or leverage the security framework, the SIP stack or the conversational/asynchronous framework into an application, customers do not have to study, build, debug and manage this code forever. As we see from the calculation above, the cost of buying these features can be a fraction of the cost of building them.

The second push for developer productivity is to give developers tooling that makes it easy to use the breadth of features the app server/platform provides. The simplified programming model and tools that BEA delivered in WebLogic Platform 8.1, which are now being re-implemented as Eclipse plug-ins for Apache Beehive in WebLogic Platform 9.0, makes these features usable by mere mortals and far faster to implement. BEA is continuing down this path with additional frameworks and tools, such as Spring.

WebLogic also comes with out-of-the-box integration into most LDAP, Web server, tooling and other products that touch the application server, as well as connectivity to any packaged or custom application.

Systems administrators need to get applications into production, find and troubleshoot problems and keep a myriad of systems up and running. The Runtime Analyzer Tool in JRockit helps profile application behavior so bottlenecks can be isolated and worked on. The Memory Leak Detector can take hours or days out of QA or prevent system downtime. The Security Framework gives administrators the ability to configure security policy in a production application. WebLogic also plugs into the leading system management, security and HA frameworks, giving administrators a unified view of their systems. The clustering, transaction management and guaranteed messaging capabilities in WebLogic do everything possible to make sure that sessions, messages or transactions are not lost in the event of a failure. WebLogic Server 9.0 adds side by side deployment, a new diagnostics framework, a Portal based console and other features that are focused on making the administrator’s life easier.

All of this comes from a platform that has been hardened in more deployments that any other application server. The newest IDC market share data shows that BEA is #1 in UNIX and #1 in Linux deployments- the biggest and fastest growing markets.

Earlier this month a company called PushtoTest benchmarked the features and performance of application servers from BEA, IBM, Oracle, JBoss and others. WebLogic Server dominated the results.

Summary

The application server choice can have a profound impact on the total cost, time and likelihood of success for a project. WebLogic can easily earn back it's 2% of the project cost many times over. Free or lower cost alternatives can negatively impact all aspects of a project.

The net is that customers must look beyond the individual product costs to make sound decisions and not be lured by what appears to be a cost cutting solution.

My full blog is here.

Comments

• Hi Eric,

  I have worked with WLS8.1SP3, mainly on portal and some WLI.

  Our consultant recommended the solutions and with respect to support. We'll have to go through them to raise issues to BEA. This has resulted in long response time. For instance, we received the patch for SP2 after more than 5 months. Before that, we're in the dark as to why the server consumed too much memory for too few users. With this, we're under the impression that the support in SEA is not strong.

  Many times when we request for information on esupport, we're referred to the online documentation by the person assigned to the ticket. If we raise a new ticket, which may be related to the old ticket, a new person will handle it and request for a whole new set of logs and information.

  Maybe BEA can take a look at the support model that Oracle provides (Metalink); the response is great and the Knowledge Base is search-friendly.

  It's a waste that a technologically excellent product like BEA should suffer just because of a less-than-excellent support.

  Posted by: mauistorm on July 27, 2005 at 8:08 PM

• Invision, a third party that tracks referenceablility of customers of BEA, IBM, Oracle, Microsoft and others, had BEA well ahead of the pack in the last survey. That said, it wouldn't surprise me if some cases were not handled as well as they could be. Shoot me an email and I will look into it. Eric estahl@bea.com

  Posted by: estahl on July 28, 2005 at 8:08 AM

• My mistake, the name of the company that tracks customer referenceability is Prognostics.

  Posted by: estahl on July 28, 2005 at 8:13 AM

• Hi Mauistorm, I apologize for the Support problems you have encountered. A majority of our customers have been satisfied with our eSupport and our response times. Have you tried calling into BEA Support directly instead of using eSupport? Are you a registered user? We send out Critical Alert notifications biweekly to registered users for things like Service Pack availability. Please verify that BEA has your most recent contact info. Regards, Todd Chipman Director of Marketing BEA Systems

  Posted by: Todd Chipman on August 2, 2005 at 12:30 PM

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• hi, i dont have clear idea of Weblogic software but after three or four months down the line, i may be working on Web logic. i love to have Weblogic CD. thanks.

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