Al Sherkow writes: >Integrated Workload Pricing does not change the charges or >value unit requirements of the WebSphere products. The 'value' >is in reduced software charges for CICS and IMS.
IBM announced Getting Started Sub-Capacity IPLA licensing for several WebSphere products some time ago (in 2008). The announcement is here (watch the wrap): http://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/rep_ca/8/897/ENUS208-088/ENUS208-088.PDF "Getting Started" is a nice financial solution to the "little WebSphere/big CICS or IMS" LPAR scenario, in particular. And even more particularly for customers with batch peaks. IBM has now figured out how to provide sub-LPAR licensing for certain products like CICS and IMS in particular WebSphere product co-location situations, hence the introduction of the complementary Integrated Workload Pricing. I don't speak for IBM, but this is all very good news. As most of us are aware (and unlike every other operating system I can think of), with z/OS you don't need to create additional partitions or add additional machines to support additional workloads, groups of users, security domains, etc. The z/OS Workload Manager, to pick one notable example, helps serve different users and different applications according to different SLAs but all within the same system image (or plex). Most mainframe customers are quite familiar with this capability and use far fewer system images to deliver application services than would be required with other operating systems. There aren't too many organizations with thousands of z/OS images, yet that's routine (and getting more routine) for other operating systems, sadly. (Many, probably most, z/OS customers have thousands of identifiably discrete workloads, however.) Consequently many customers have asked IBM to find ways to "keep things simple" as much as possible, to preserve this simplicity as they grow in various ways. So IBM has been working hard on the techno-financial problems involved in accurately measuring usage at the sub-LPAR level. Integrated Workload Pricing is the next step in that evolution. Integrated Workload Pricing means that more customers can justify co-locating WebSphere products with CICS and/or IMS in the same LPAR(s) while licensing each product family based on actual usage of each. They can also enjoy the technical advantages that come with co-location, such as reduced latency, improved end-to-end performance, more efficient memory utilization, and the option to use mainframe-unique intra-LPAR features including the WebSphere Optimized Local Adapters. And that's all goodness. That said, there are still going to be technical and/or financial reasons to provision additional LPARs (or perhaps z/VM instances), and we shouldn't be *overly* concerned about that. There's probably too much "LPAR phobia" in the world. But IBM took a nice step closer to perfection here, in my opinion. - - - - - Timothy Sipples Resident Enterprise Architect STG Value Creation & Complex Deals Team IBM Growth Markets (Based in Singapore) E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
