[gpfsug-discuss] Spectrum Scale licensing

[Lehmann, Greg (IM&T, Pullenvale)]

Plus one.

It is not just volume licensing. The socket licensing costs have gone through the roof, at least in Australia. IBM tempts you with a cheap introduction and then once you are hooked, ramps up the price. They are counting on the migration costs outweighing the licensing fee increases. Unfortunately, our management won't stand for this business approach, so we get to do the migrations (boring as the proverbial bat ... you know what.)

I think this forum is a good place to discuss it. IBM and customers on here need to know all about it. It is a user group after all and moving away from a product is part of the lifecycle.

We were going to use GPFS for HPC scratch but went to market and ended up with BeeGFS. Further pricing pressure has meant GPFS is being phased out in all areas. We split our BeeGFS cluster of NVMe servers in half on arrival and have been trying other filesystems on half of it. We were going to try GPFS ECE but given the pricing we have been quoted have decided not to waste our time. We are gearing up to try Lustre on it. We have also noted the feature improvements with Lustre.

Maybe if IBM had saved the money that a rebranding costs (GPFS to Spectrum Scale) they would not have had to crank up the price of GPFS?

Cheers,

Greg


From: gpfsug-discuss-bounces at spectrumscale.org <gpfsug-discuss-bounces at spectrumscale.org> On Behalf Of Flanders, Dean
Sent: Thursday, April 16, 2020 1:27 PM
To: gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org
Subject: [gpfsug-discuss] Spectrum Scale licensing

Hello All,

As IBM has completely switched to capacity based licensing in order to use SS v5 I was wondering how others are dealing with this? We do not find the capacity based licensing sustainable. Our long term plan is to migrate away from SS v5 to Lustre, and based on the Lustre roadmap we have seen it should have the features we need within the next ~1 year (we are fortunate to have good contacts). We would really like to stay with SS/GPFS and have been big advocates of SS/GPFS over the years, but the capacity based licensing is pushing us into evaluating alternatives. I realize this may not be proper to discuss this directly in this email list, so feel free to email directly with your suggestions or your plans.

Thanks and kind regards,

Dean
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