Hi,
yesterday a group of TSM admins from universities in south west Germany
(including me) met with Tivoli sales reps to find an agreement for new
contracts for new licenses and maintenance fees. Most of us must get new
maintenance contracts for TSM version 4 because the 1 year warranty period
is expiring. The aquisition was done using the old licensing scheme. The
first step to a maintenance contract is to set up an inventory to find out
how many "Tivoli management points" we have.

To explain it a little bit more detailed: with the new licnesing policy you
pay for points. All TSM products (as well as other Tivoli products) have a
number of points. This number depends on the product itself (server, client,
space management etc) and the hardware it runs on. The latter is called
tier. E.g., plain Intel machines are tier 1, RISC Unix boxes like
RS/6000-43P are tier 2, mainframes tier 3. Furthermore, there is no longer
just a client. Machines running TSM client software are classified as
clients and servers. This term "server" doesn't mean "TSM server". Each
system acting as a print server, MS Active Directory server, WWW server or
file server is a server in this sense and therefore the license fee for a
TSM client software on this system is higher. This causes severe problems
for me.

I have 577 registered clients on my TSM server. They are distributed over a
large area. Due to the decentralized structure of our university we do not
have a central inventory of all machines. It is impossible for me to walk
around and inspect all machines to figure out how many processors are
installed. So I have to find a rule of thumb how many servers we have and of
which tier.

I think I'm not alone with this problem. It would beinteresting what
strategies other institutions are using. Any  hint ore advice is
appreciated!

Many thanks in advance!
Gerhard

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Gerhard Rentschler            email:g.rentschler AT rus.uni-stuttgart DOT de
Gerhard Rentschler            email:g.rentschler AT rus.uni-stuttgart DOT de
Regional Computing Center     tel.   ++49/711/685 5806
University of Stuttgart       fax:   ++49/711/682357
Allmandring 30a
D 70550
Stuttgart
Germany