The announcement letter provides a full list of the affected products, so there's no need to guess. See IBM announcement 312-129 (U.S. version), for example.
These are monthly license charge IBM software products that are not eligible for sub-capacity software licensing. Overwhelmingly they're older products which were never updated to produce SMF89 records. All of them were introduced in the 20th century. Some products are still supported but many are not. (IBM keeps them in the catalog with pricing just in case someone, somewhere has a license or needs one. "Forever" is part of what makes a mainframe a mainframe, and that's a good thing.) Many, perhaps most, mainframe installations do not run any of these products. Among those that do, the vast majority run only one or a couple of these products. Take a look at the list and you'll see what I mean. The most popular FWLC products are probably DITTO/ESA (as previously mentioned) and VS FORTRAN, although there are a couple others that are also interesting. For additional context, there's some inflation in the world. But I think the bigger story is that today's (and even yesterday's) machines have such enormous capacity that you often don't need as many boxes as you used to. So if you used to license 6 machines 10 years ago and now you only license, say, 3 much bigger machines, then you've cut your FWLC software products bill in half. Although it's rather unlikely that this announcement will "rock your world," here's some free and most definitely unofficial advice. As a general rule you should favor placing your FWLC products on your biggest machine(s). That just makes sense: if it's a flat charge per machine, you might as well put such software on the smallest viable number of the biggest machines you have to get the most value out of it. Of course there are exceptions to every general rule, and you mustn't get too crazy. I see way too many IT organizations trying to optimize the most efficient parts of their infrastructure and deployments at the expense of failing to optimize the least efficient. Writing only for myself, not IBM. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Timothy Sipples Consulting Enterprise IT Architect (Based in Singapore) E-Mail: [email protected] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
