Oracle's support costs are lower?
Now I know that Larry is lying! :)
Oracle has pledged to be the planet's lowest-cost provider of core data centre equipment. Executive Chair Larry Ellison today announced a refresh of the company's Engineered Systems range – they're now called X5 – and a new strategy to offer the industry's lowest purchase prices. Ellison's rationale for the low-price play is …
(Disclamer, I work for NetApp)
Cisco - Oracle = $354k (44% of the total price difference)
NetApp - Oracle = $60k (7% of the...)
RH+VMware+UCS - Oracle = $386k (48%...)
(1% rounding)
Unless you're using a different calculator to me, the big differences according to Oracle's numbers and design come from the Cisco and RH+VMware+UCS buckets.
In fact, storage is the inexpensive part of the solution from both vendors, yet it's the foundation of the solution since all that deduplicated, snapshotted, mirrored, efficienctly cloned data makes the solution work.
Lastly, if price were the only important factor in either solution then white box BSD/Linux with KVM/OpenStack running ZFS natively supported by strangers 'on the internet boards' would be the cheapest way, but for some reason isn't favoured by enterprise companies...