[gpfsug-discuss] Spectrum Scale licensing - important correction

[Jonathan Buzzard]

On 17/04/2020 11:31, T.A. Yeep wrote:
> Hi Carl,
> 
> I'm confused here, in the previous email it was said *And for ESS, it is 
> licensed Per Drive with different prices for HDDs and SSDs.*
> 
> But then you mentioned in below email that:
> But new customers and new OEM systems are *all licensed by Capacity. 
> This also applies to IBM's own ESS*: you can keep upgrading your old (if 
> hardware is supported) gen 1 ESS on Sockets, but if you replace it with 
> *a new ESS, that will come with capacity licenses*.
> 
> Now the question, ESS is license per Drive or by capacity?
> 

Well by drive is "capacity" based licensing unless you have some sort of 
magical infinite capacity drives :-)

Under the PVU scheme if you know what you are doing you could game the 
system. For example get a handful of servers get PVU licenses for them 
create a GPFS file system handing off the back using say Fibre Channel 
and cheap FC attached arrays (Dell MD3000 series springs to mind) and 
then hang many PB off the back. I could using this scheme create a 100PB 
filesystem for under a thousand PVU of GPFS server licenses. Add in 
another cluster for protocol nodes and if you are not mounting on HPC 
nodes that's a winner :-)

In a similar manner I use a pimped out ancient Dell R300 with dual core 
Xeon for backing up my GPFS filesystem because it's 100PVU of TSM 
licensing and I am cheap, and besides it is more than enough grunt for 
the job. A new machine would be 240 PVU minimum (4*70). I plan on 
replacing the PERC SAS6 card with a H710 and new internal cabling to run 
RHEL8 :-)


JAB.

-- 
Jonathan A. Buzzard                         Tel: +44141-5483420
HPC System Administrator, ARCHIE-WeSt.
University of Strathclyde, John Anderson Building, Glasgow. G4 0NG