Dave, Ed Jaffe spoke quite nicely about the IPLA impact as long as your shop has signed the IPLA sub-capacity agreement. If not, upgrade fees are immediately due based on purchased capacity, soft-capped or not.
I believe it is the responsibility of capacity planners to make sure there is sufficient capacity installed to meet business requirements. With the proper sub-capacity agreements in place, you only pay for what you use. Upgrade fees only come into play if one is using the capacity. If I could drive our machines flat out, I would hope that that usage is caused by an organic growth spurt that equates to increased revenue generation. If that is true, I would be more than happy to acquire more capacity! If it is a misbehaving application or system software product, IBM, as you know, has made allowances in SCRT reporting to eliminate those extra MSUs consumed. Shane was only too willing to agree that I have been spoiled by working in large shops. While true, I still pursue most opportunities to reduce the software bill. But as I said before, I try to draw the line on soft-capping a production environment for purely cost reasons. YMMV. I prefer to go after other areas that are wasting more money than the mainframe (distributed software) and address those issues. Bob Richards -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Dave Kopischke Sent: Friday, September 21, 2007 12:18 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: WLC, WLM and all the rest: how optimize them ? Soft-capping is a means to control software costs by overbuying capacity and limiting upgrade fee costs. If you run your machine flat out all the time, what do you do when you run out of capacity??? Upgrade the machine is the only option. Then you get hammered with upgrade fees. Now a major project of acquisition comes along and you have to upgrade again. More upgrade fees. Consider the situation where you buy extra capacity on the front end and soft cap it. You pay more for the machine and slightly higher upgrade fees on the front end. But from a monthly usage standpoint, you are essentially paying for a smaller machine. Now that big project or acquisition comes along. You dial up a few more MSUs and you're good to go. Your montly software bill is higher, but NO upgrade fees. Another point to consider is if you softcap to 70% of your total capacity (this is an arbitrary number, so make it whatever you want), the capacity you don't use during slow periods is available to you later (within the 4 hour rolling average). In our case, everyone takes off for lunch and not much is happening for a while after lunch. Then the market closes and pricing begins. We can run our machine at 90 - 100% of capacity to handle that sudden rush of workload. We still pay for the 70% of capacity though. >Snipped LEGAL DISCLAIMER The information transmitted is intended solely for the individual or entity to which it is addressed and may contain confidential and/or privileged material. Any review, retransmission, dissemination or other use of or taking action in reliance upon this information by persons or entities other than the intended recipient is prohibited. If you have received this email in error please contact the sender and delete the material from any computer. SunTrust and Seeing beyond money are federally registered service marks of SunTrust Banks, Inc. [ST:XCL] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
