>Now the question, ESS is license per Drive or by capacity?

I apologize for the confusion. Within IBM Storage when we say “capacity” 
licensing we use that as an umbrella term for both Per TB/PB *or* Per Drive 
(HDD or SSD). This is contrasted with “processor” metrics including Socket and 
the even older PVU licensing.

And yes, we IBMers should be more careful about our tendency to use terminology 
that nobody else in the world does. (Don’t get me started on terabyte versus 
tebibyte…).

So, for the sake of completeness and for anybody reviewing the thread in the 
future:


  *   Per Drive is available with ESS, Lenovo DSS, and a number of other OEM 
solutions*.
  *   Per TB/Per PB is available for software defined storage, including some 
OEM solutions - basically anywhere where figuring out the number of physical 
drives is infeasible.**
  *   You can if you wish license ESS with Per TB/PB, for example if you want 
to have a single pool of licensing across an environment that mixes 
software-defined, ESS, or public cloud; or if you want to include your ESS 
licenses in an ELA. This is almost always more expensive than Per Drive, but 
some customers are willing to pay for the privilege of the flexibility.

I hope that helps.



*(In some cases the customer may not even know it because the OEM solution is 
sold as a whole with a bottom line price, and the customer does not see a line 
item price for Scale. In at least one case, the vertical market solution 
doesn’t even expose the fact that the storage is provided by Scale.)

**(Imagine trying to figure out the “real” number of drives in a high-end 
storage array that does RAIDing, hides some drives as spares, offers thin 
provisioning, etc. Or on public cloud where the “drives” are all virtual.)




Carl Zetie
Program Director
Offering Management
Spectrum Scale
----
(919) 473 3318 ][ Research Triangle Park
[email protected]

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