Introducing Differential Licensing

Over the years its become clear that a TB isn’t what it used to be, for example the maximum tier of SVC license capacity back in 2003 was 32TB… so things have changed. We wanted to reflect this in the managed (mdisk) capacity licensing. Not all TB are equal…

In order to maintain current licensing tiers and existing entitlement, we have transitioned the measure of units. Taking from todays per TB license, to a new Storage Capacity Unit (SCU) license. 1TB today = 1SCU. So if you have 500TB license today, you now have 500SCU

As I said this applies to managed capacity licenses (today the base virtuallization and Real-time Compression licenses. FlashCopy and Remote Replication licensing are unchanged and remain based on the virtual disk capacity.*

Initially we have introduced three SCU categories – and this leaves us scope for future categories as deemed necessary

	Use Case Examples	Technologies
Category 1	Performance optimized workloads and applications	Flash and SSD
Category 2	Medium performance and/or read intensive workloads and applictions	SAS drives, fibre-channel drives and systems using Category 3 drives with advanced architectures to deliver high-end storage capabilities (i.e. XIV)
Category 3	Economical tier for less active data or backup and archive	NL-SAS and SATA

SCU calculations then align these different storage use cases to different capacity points

Category 1	1 SCU = 1.00 TiB usable	1 TiB = 1 SCU
Category 2	1 SCU = 1.18 TiB usable	1 TiB = 0.85 SCU
Category 3	1 SCU = 4.00 TiB usable	1 TiB = 0.25 SCU

This new differential licensing applies to Spectrum Virtualize, Spectrum Control and VSC* The products today don’t provide a roll up of this capacity, but in releases later this year you will have a simple view of what your SCU usage is. The way you define the SCU is based on the definitions of an mdisks EasyTier classification, with today the mappings as below

Category 1	ssd  (or sas_ssd)
Category 2	enterprise # (or sas_enterprise)
Category 3	nearline (or sas_nearline)

# Note that the new Read Intensive drives are not yet supported by default in the Easy Tier hierarchy, but you should use these as Enterprise and Category 2 for licensing purpises.

Note on Virtual Storage Centre (VSC)*

One side effect of the new licensing is that it makes VSC an even more cost effective solution when you want to deploy both Spectrum Virtualise, Spectrum Control and make use of the advanced functions that are normally independent license. VSC includes all additional licenses (with the exception of Real-time compression). Thus if you purchase 100SCU for VSC, then you can use 100SCU of capacity and 100SCU of volume capacity FlashCopy, and Replication. This differs from the base product license where you are still TB licensed for virtual volume capacity.

One final note, while you may now have more license than you need, there isn’t a method to refund or reduce license, but you can now grow your capacity without increasing license costs.