GBase 8s: End-to-End Cost Savings to Combat Soaring Hardware Costs
Amid soaring hardware prices, mounting procurement costs, and budgets that can no longer cover expenses, the GBase database family's product features and capabilities can satisfy the urgent need to lower hardware configurations and reduce the number of hardware units—making GBase the optimal choice for database procurement today.
In the journey of digital transformation, costs related to database hardware, storage, operations, and energy create significant financial pressure. GBase 8s, a centralized OLTP database purpose-built for core scenarios in finance, telecommunications, and government, leverages four core capabilities—memory elasticity, storage sharing, automated operations, and migration compatibility—to deliver a full-chain cost reduction pathway. Compared with competing products, the overall cost savings range from 30% to 60%. This article will break down these four pathways, explaining the logic behind the savings and the real-world results.
Memory Cost Reduction: Getting the Most out of Every Megabyte
Traditional databases often use a "flood irrigation" approach to memory, pre-allocating large chunks of space that end up underutilized. GBase 8s splits shared memory into three independently scalable segments:
Resident segment: caches disk data, with size precisely controlled via parameters—no excess, no waste.
Virtual memory segment: used for session creation, sorting, grouping, and joins. It is allocated on demand, taking exactly what's needed and returning it when done.
Version segment: stores row data and transaction version information, supporting rapid garbage collection without accumulation.
Additionally, global memory ceiling control (SHMTOTAL parameter) prevents the database from squeezing out the operating system's memory. A low-memory protection mechanism reserves enough "emergency rations" for critical operations like rollbacks when it matters most.
Savings Impact: Compared with competitors' "one-size-fits-all" memory allocation, GBase 8s reduces memory usage by 20% to 30%.
Proof in Practice: In Phase 4 of Shenzhen Metro, the CLC central database master node handles over 13,000 concurrent connections daily, consuming only 58 GB of physical memory in the virtual segment—averaging just 4.5 MB per session. Since going live in 2022, it has operated with zero downtime.
Storage Cost Savings: Freeing Up Space with Shared Storage
Legacy primary-standby clusters store four copies of data (one primary, three standbys), causing storage costs to multiply. GBase 8s's shared storage cluster (SSC) takes a different path:
Separation of storage and compute: multiple compute nodes share a single copy of data, stored only once.
Storage sharing: all nodes in the cluster use the same dataset, eliminating redundancy.
Data compression: supports row-level compression with a maximum compression ratio of up to 90%, typically 40–60%.
Active-active cluster: in a same-city primary/standby data center setup, bandwidth leasing costs are over 50% lower than competing solutions.
Savings Impact: Storage costs reduced by over 50%, literally cutting storage capacity needs in half.
Proof in Practice: In a PB-scale project, the customer purchased a 20 TB all-flash disk array. A traditional primary-standby cluster (one primary, three standbys) would have required at least 80 TB. With GBase 8s's four-node shared storage cluster, only 20 TB was needed—delivering 75% savings on storage costs.
Operational Cost Savings: From Manual On-Call to Remote Oversight for DBAs
In database operations, the biggest cost is labor. The GBase 8s GEM unified management platform makes it easier:
Unified monitoring: monitors all database instances from a single platform, proactively identifies potential failures and issues early warnings.
Ops-free mode: the HAC cluster supports a "hac_alline" no-ops configuration, halving daily maintenance workload.
Savings Impact: Over 50% reduction in operations staffing needs.
Proof in Practice: At Shenzhen Metro, GEM monitors 220 GBase 8s instances; at Bank of Guangzhou, it monitors 18 instances. The myth of one DBA managing dozens of clusters becomes reality.
Migration Cost Savings: Moving from Oracle/MySQL in Just One Day
When replacing foreign databases with a domestic solution, the biggest fear is migration—code changes, application testing, data movement. GBase 8s smooths the way:
Syntax compatibility: 95% Oracle syntax compatibility, 96% MySQL compatibility. Advanced features like PL/SQL, dblink, flashback, etc., are all supported.
Tooling support: MTK full migration tool plus RTSync real-time sync tool make migration as easy as moving house.
Savings Impact: Migration cycle cut from months to days, drastically reducing labor costs.
Proof in Practice: In March 2026, two MySQL migration projects were completed in a single day. A supplier management platform for a large energy group and a provincial archive management system were both migrated in a day.
Full-Chain Comparison: How Much Can You Save in Different Scenarios?
In lightweight government application scenarios, GBase 8s demonstrates significant cost advantages. Under the same compute configurations, competing products require 100 GB of storage, while GBase 8s needs only 50 GB thanks to efficient compression—cutting storage costs in half. In operations, competing products still demand routine manual maintenance, while GBase 8s achieves ops-free operation, reducing ops labor costs by 50%. Taken together, GBase 8s lowers total cost of ownership (TCO) by 30% compared with alternatives in this scenario.
GBase 8s's cost-saving approach does not sacrifice performance—it stems from meticulous architectural engineering: three-segment memory elasticity saves hardware costs; shared storage clusters save storage costs; automated operations save labor costs; and syntax compatibility plus migration tools save time. These four interlocking paths ensure that every dollar spent by customers is money well spent.