[gpfsug-discuss] Licensing costs for data lakes (SSUG follow-up)

Carl Zetie - carlz@us.ibm.com carlz at us.ibm.com
Mon Nov 30 13:49:12 GMT 2020


I am seeking some help on a topic I know many of you care deeply about: licensing costs

I am trying to gather some more information about a request that has come up a couple of times, pricing for “data lakes”. I would like to understand better what people are looking for here.

- Is it as simple as “much steeper discounts for very large deployments”? Or is a “data lake” something specific, e.g. a large deployment that is not performance/latency sensitive; a storage pool that is [primarily] HDD; a tier that has specific read/write patterns such as moving entire large datasets in or out; or something else? Bear in mind that if we have special licensing for data lakes, we need a rigorous definition so that both you and we know whether your use of that licensing is compliant. Nobody likes ambiguity in licensing!

- Are you expecting pricing to get very flat/discounting to get steep for large deployments? Or a different price tier/structure for “data lakes” if we can rigorously define what one means? Do you agree or disagree with the proposition that if you keep adding storage hardware/capacity, that the software licensing cost should rise in proportion (even if that proportion is much smaller for a “data lake” than for a performance tier)?

- Feel free to be creative and imaginative. For example, would you be interested in a low-cost pricing model for storage that is an AFM Home and is _only_ accessed by using AFM to move data in and out of an AFM Cache (probably on the performance tier)? This would be conceptually similar to the way you can now (5.1) use AFM-Object to park data in a cheap object store.

- Also feel free to answer questions I didn’t ask…




If you prefer to discuss this in Slack rather than email, I started a discussion there a little while ago (please thread your comments!): https://ssug-poweraiug.slack.com/archives/CEVVCEE8M/p1605815075188800




Carl Zetie
Program Director
Offering Management
Spectrum Scale
----
(919) 473 3318 ][ Research Triangle Park
carlz at us.ibm.com

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