Re: Explaining the New IBM Getting Started WebSphere Pricing Announcement
IBM is doing a webcast on Getting Started Sub-capacity Pricing for z/OS IPLA Software on Wednesday. Here is the link a href=http://ibm.com/software/systemz/webcast/30apr/; http://ibm.com/software/systemz/webcast/30apr//a Al Sherkow Consulting Expertise on Capacity Planning, Performance Tuning, WLC, LPARs, IRD and LCS Software Seminars on IBM SW Pricing, LPARs, and IRD Web: www.sherkow.com -- 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
Re: Explaining the New IBM Getting Started WebSphere Pricing Announcement
Are the individuals who come up with IBM pricing the same ones that 'help' our congress write the tax laws? - Original Message - From: Timothy Sipples [EMAIL PROTECTED] Newsgroups: bit.listserv.ibm-main To: IBM-MAIN@BAMA.UA.EDU Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2008 10:01 PM Subject: Explaining the New IBM Getting Started WebSphere Pricing Announcement I thought I'd try to perform a public service to help educate everyone on IBM's new pricing announcement on April 22, 2008. (Demystifying software pricing seems to be one of my unofficial missions in life.) First, the headline: this announcement is *unambiguously good news* for customers: nobody pays more, and many customers pay less. Quite simply IBM is making it even more financially attractive to start new projects with WebSphere products for z/OS. IBM is very directly responding to many of you who did not want to create and manage separate WebSphere LPARs for whatever reason(s). Here's the link to the announcement: http://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/rep_ca/8/897/ENUS208-088/ENUS208088.PDF Here's my personal take. The pricing announcement affects the following WebSphere products for z/OS: WebSphere Application Server WebSphere Process Server WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus WebSphere Service Registry and Repository WebSphere Business Service Fabric WebSphere Transformation Extender WebSphere Message Broker and IBM expects to add these two products as well: WebSphere Portal Enable WebSphere Extended Deployment The announcement is exclusively for z/OS customers, not for any other platforms. All these products are licensed under the IBM International Program License Agreement (IPLA), and they are also known colloquially as One-Time Charge (OTC) software products. That means when you buy a license you own that license in perpetuity for that version (at a specific quantity). You can also buy optional subscription and support (SS) annually; you buy the first year via another part number together with your initial license. Almost everyone does by SS, because as long as you maintain continuous SS you receive new versions as they are introduced at no additional charge. If you let your subscription lapse for whatever reason it costs more to reinstate subscription. Most IBM mainframe software products are licensed under IPLA terms. What's changing now is how IBM measures the quantity you must order if you want to license and use these products. Now, I'm going to assume here you are a sub-capacity Variable Workload License Charge (VWLC) customer sending in your Sub-Capacity Reporting Tool (SCRT) reports each month. I don't think this pricing announcement affects you at all unless you are sending SCRT reports to IBM. IPLA software is priced and licensed according to Value Units (VUs). VUs are calculated directly from MSUs, the common standard for measuring software capacity which you all probably know very well. There is a formula to convert MSUs to VUs (called a Value Unit Exhibit). You can find the VU Exhibit in every IPLA software product announcement letter. I think all of the WebSphere products listed above are licensed according to VUE007 (Value Unit Exhibit 7). In VUE007 up to 3 MSUs equates to 1 Value Unit, for example. Value Unit exhibits serve one major purpose: they introduce a volume discount schedule while allowing IBM to publish one price (the price per Value Unit). The Value Unit exhibit means that the more MSUs you buy, the less each additional MSU costs. However, as I've mentioned many times, the minimum order quantity is only 1 Value Unit. So for a small project (or a small mainframe) these IPLA products are aggressively priced. On every other processor (such as X86) the minimum order quantity is 100 Value Units, and more realistically 400+ for any real-world implementation. Those X86 Value Units are calculated differently, but there is a gaping price difference (in the mainframe's favor) between 1 mainframe Value Unit and even 100 X86 Value Units. From an IPLA WebSphere point of view the mainframe quite simply scales *down* in price better than any other platform, and that's a surprise to a lot of people. Just as any other z/OS software, what counts is your peak 4 hour rolling average of MSUs. For IPLA software that's the aggregate peak across your enterprise (across multiple machines if you have more than one) and at any time. For example, if you have two machines, and one machine peaks at 3 MSUs and the other at 2 MSUs, you will need 5 MSUs (translated to VUs) of IPLA software. It does not matter whether the machines are in a Parallel Sysplex or not for IPLA: you always use a single Value Unit Exhibit, per product, across your enterprise. Now you do not get the benefit of any workload troughs with IPLA. (Sorry about that. That's one advantage to MLC.) If you peak at 5 MSUs in January, and then you drop down to 3 MSUs in February, then back up to 5 MSUs in March, you still need 5 MSUs. You have to license enough MSUs (Value Units
Re: Explaining the New IBM Getting Started WebSphere Pricing Announcement
--snip--- Are the individuals who come up with IBM pricing the same ones that 'help' our congress write the tax laws? -unsnip-- NOBODY who actually works for a living could possibly be THAT convoluted! :-) -- 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
Re: Explaining the New IBM Getting Started WebSphere Pricing Announcement
Timothy -- Thanks for the nice explanation. Besides using SCRT the site also most be sub-capacity for IPLA. This is a separate agreement with IBM. If you take a snapshot today of your environment to determine if you should use Sub-Capacity IPLA the answer will likely be that you cannot save any money. If you are already properly entitled, that is you have the proper number of value units for your IPLA products, then Sub-Capacity does not matter. And as your workload grows you still have the proper number of value units because you acquired them for the whole machine. When it is important is before the *next* upgrade. If you go to sub-cap IPLA before the next upgrade you may have enough entitled value units to not acquire more with the upgrade. Do not expect your sales person to point this out to you! You may have excess value units, but you must still pay the SS until your use grows into them. But with those excess value units you can use the IPLA products in additional LPARs or on additional machines. Your value units are the for enterprise, not a specific machines. This is true of any IPLA product not just the websphere family. -- 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
Re: Explaining the New IBM Getting Started WebSphere Pricing Announcement
So if I read this right, these products will actually record how many MSU's they are using in a given LPAR and we will be charged for the max concurrent 4HR MSU (converted to VU) for the product across all LPARs. The only real difference from VWLC is that I need to be licensed for the most I will use rather than charges varying monthly. Why introduce the complexity, why not just make it VWLC? Are these the first products to actually record their individual consumption? IIRC all other products just register that they are in use and VWLC bases charges on LPAR consumption while the product is in use. Ken Porowski AVP Systems Software CIT Group E: [EMAIL PROTECTED] -Original Message- Timothy Sipples IBM can do this because these IPLA products (or at least the WebSphere Application Server code underneath them) can produce the necessary SMF records to generate SCRT reports for billing. It's yet another step toward more granular sub-LPAR pricing, so you can have fewer LPARs yet not pay for the whole LPAR for certain products with low utilization. And WebSphere products might be low utilization as you get started, so you can more easily justify starting on the mainframe, even for one small application. -- 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
Re: Explaining the New IBM Getting Started WebSphere Pricing Announcement
Al Sherkow wrote: This is my opinion only. IBM is doing this to make these WebSphere products more attractive for implementation on zSeries. Why not make these straight VWLC? well lots of sites have bought value units and don't want to pay monthly for these again. This is a guess, because the announcement is quite vague about how this will work, but the only way SCRT can measure a product within an LPAR using the SMF70 and SMF89 data is through the CPU consumption data that is already in the SMF89 data. They are doing now for MQ Series with the SALC metric. So that precedent already exists. In effect like SALC this is another type of measured usage within sub-capacity pricing that does not allow measured usage. Oh what a tangled web we weave Sir Walter Scott, Marmion, Canto vi. Stanza 17. Scottish author novelist (1771 - 1832) Yes, one of my favorite lines. Sadly, you only quoted the first part; the rest is, appropriately, When first we practice to deceive! Bob -- 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
Explaining the New IBM Getting Started WebSphere Pricing Announcement
I thought I'd try to perform a public service to help educate everyone on IBM's new pricing announcement on April 22, 2008. (Demystifying software pricing seems to be one of my unofficial missions in life.) First, the headline: this announcement is *unambiguously good news* for customers: nobody pays more, and many customers pay less. Quite simply IBM is making it even more financially attractive to start new projects with WebSphere products for z/OS. IBM is very directly responding to many of you who did not want to create and manage separate WebSphere LPARs for whatever reason(s). Here's the link to the announcement: http://www.ibm.com/common/ssi/rep_ca/8/897/ENUS208-088/ENUS208088.PDF Here's my personal take. The pricing announcement affects the following WebSphere products for z/OS: WebSphere Application Server WebSphere Process Server WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus WebSphere Service Registry and Repository WebSphere Business Service Fabric WebSphere Transformation Extender WebSphere Message Broker and IBM expects to add these two products as well: WebSphere Portal Enable WebSphere Extended Deployment The announcement is exclusively for z/OS customers, not for any other platforms. All these products are licensed under the IBM International Program License Agreement (IPLA), and they are also known colloquially as One-Time Charge (OTC) software products. That means when you buy a license you own that license in perpetuity for that version (at a specific quantity). You can also buy optional subscription and support (SS) annually; you buy the first year via another part number together with your initial license. Almost everyone does by SS, because as long as you maintain continuous SS you receive new versions as they are introduced at no additional charge. If you let your subscription lapse for whatever reason it costs more to reinstate subscription. Most IBM mainframe software products are licensed under IPLA terms. What's changing now is how IBM measures the quantity you must order if you want to license and use these products. Now, I'm going to assume here you are a sub-capacity Variable Workload License Charge (VWLC) customer sending in your Sub-Capacity Reporting Tool (SCRT) reports each month. I don't think this pricing announcement affects you at all unless you are sending SCRT reports to IBM. IPLA software is priced and licensed according to Value Units (VUs). VUs are calculated directly from MSUs, the common standard for measuring software capacity which you all probably know very well. There is a formula to convert MSUs to VUs (called a Value Unit Exhibit). You can find the VU Exhibit in every IPLA software product announcement letter. I think all of the WebSphere products listed above are licensed according to VUE007 (Value Unit Exhibit 7). In VUE007 up to 3 MSUs equates to 1 Value Unit, for example. Value Unit exhibits serve one major purpose: they introduce a volume discount schedule while allowing IBM to publish one price (the price per Value Unit). The Value Unit exhibit means that the more MSUs you buy, the less each additional MSU costs. However, as I've mentioned many times, the minimum order quantity is only 1 Value Unit. So for a small project (or a small mainframe) these IPLA products are aggressively priced. On every other processor (such as X86) the minimum order quantity is 100 Value Units, and more realistically 400+ for any real-world implementation. Those X86 Value Units are calculated differently, but there is a gaping price difference (in the mainframe's favor) between 1 mainframe Value Unit and even 100 X86 Value Units. From an IPLA WebSphere point of view the mainframe quite simply scales *down* in price better than any other platform, and that's a surprise to a lot of people. Just as any other z/OS software, what counts is your peak 4 hour rolling average of MSUs. For IPLA software that's the aggregate peak across your enterprise (across multiple machines if you have more than one) and at any time. For example, if you have two machines, and one machine peaks at 3 MSUs and the other at 2 MSUs, you will need 5 MSUs (translated to VUs) of IPLA software. It does not matter whether the machines are in a Parallel Sysplex or not for IPLA: you always use a single Value Unit Exhibit, per product, across your enterprise. Now you do not get the benefit of any workload troughs with IPLA. (Sorry about that. That's one advantage to MLC.) If you peak at 5 MSUs in January, and then you drop down to 3 MSUs in February, then back up to 5 MSUs in March, you still need 5 MSUs. You have to license enough MSUs (Value Units) to cover your highest peak, before you reach the peak. If you only need that higher peak for a short time (a few days), you can purchase MSU-days of IPLA software from IBM. Typically you might do that with temporary Capacity On Demand activations. If you inadvertantly shoot past your peak (for the license quantity you have), send IBM an order for more as fast as
