[gpfsug-discuss] Spectrum Scale licensing - important correction
Jonathan Buzzard
jonathan.buzzard at strath.ac.uk
Fri Apr 17 11:50:22 BST 2020
On 17/04/2020 11:31, T.A. Yeep wrote:
> Hi Carl,
>
> I'm confused here, in the previous email it was said *And for ESS, it is
> licensed Per Drive with different prices for HDDs and SSDs.*
>
> But then you mentioned in below email that:
> But new customers and new OEM systems are *all licensed by Capacity.
> This also applies to IBM's own ESS*: you can keep upgrading your old (if
> hardware is supported) gen 1 ESS on Sockets, but if you replace it with
> *a new ESS, that will come with capacity licenses*.
>
> Now the question, ESS is license per Drive or by capacity?
>
Well by drive is "capacity" based licensing unless you have some sort of
magical infinite capacity drives :-)
Under the PVU scheme if you know what you are doing you could game the
system. For example get a handful of servers get PVU licenses for them
create a GPFS file system handing off the back using say Fibre Channel
and cheap FC attached arrays (Dell MD3000 series springs to mind) and
then hang many PB off the back. I could using this scheme create a 100PB
filesystem for under a thousand PVU of GPFS server licenses. Add in
another cluster for protocol nodes and if you are not mounting on HPC
nodes that's a winner :-)
In a similar manner I use a pimped out ancient Dell R300 with dual core
Xeon for backing up my GPFS filesystem because it's 100PVU of TSM
licensing and I am cheap, and besides it is more than enough grunt for
the job. A new machine would be 240 PVU minimum (4*70). I plan on
replacing the PERC SAS6 card with a H710 and new internal cabling to run
RHEL8 :-)
JAB.
--
Jonathan A. Buzzard Tel: +44141-5483420
HPC System Administrator, ARCHIE-WeSt.
University of Strathclyde, John Anderson Building, Glasgow. G4 0NG
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