License Pricing Insanity

PREDATAR Control23

Nice One

Jesse

I'm not sure which corporation you work for, and I dont think that really needs to be added to the thread. However we are paying >$5 per PVU for a basic client license and >$10 per PVU for the TDP License. We just 'renegotiated' to get these figures. Your figure sounds to me, more like the ongoing annual maintenance cost not the license cost.

If it is the initial license cost then I would love to get a ballpark idea of how many CPU cores or total PVU's you have in use for your negotiations. Oh and a vague Ideaa of your industry.

A few notes:

Based on this years published price list IBM now assigns more PVU per core for identical CPU cores on an 8 socket mother board vs one on a single or dual socket mother board. This is regardless of whether 7 of the sockets are empty.

When I looked at pricing during the early days of TSM 6.? it included yet another significant pricing per PVU uplift vs TSM5.5 for new licenses. Probably to pay for the 'Free' DB2 installation.


It is and always will be insane to charge for PVU's / CPU's etc when looking at backups. Thats like the electric company charging me for the number of appliances I have regardless of whether I use them or not.

I doubt anyone will ever accuse IBM of being easy to work with but this pricing model isn't just insane its Obscene.

Its not even my money and I hate being so blatently ripped off . Vent Over
SC.
 
PREDATAR Control23

Nicer One

Icewalker,

I wish I had the time to respond as fully as you did.

Unfortunately it took me 4 months to do our TSM Sub capacity Audit so I'm a little behind this year. Yes we do cripple our servers (sorry mate!)

I completely agree with everything you said. Why does management not listen to the people they pay for advice rather than the salesmen on the golf course. Corporations are now so incestuous I doubt there is a single senior exec out there without close friends in, or who at some time didnt work for, Big Blue.

I get personal ethics responsibilities thrust down my throat all the time but its fine for IBM to do what the they like to keep moving their stuff.

SC
 
PREDATAR Control23

Your figure sounds to me, more like the ongoing annual maintenance cost not the license cost. If it is the initial license cost then I would love to get a ballpark idea of how many CPU cores or total PVU's you have in use for your negotiations. Oh and a vague Ideaa of your industry.

I work in the insurance industry. Below are last years licensing numbers:

TSM Extended Ed 10 Value Units - E029ELL - QTY= 21290
TSM for DB 10 Value Units - E028WLL - QTY = 500
TSM for Mail 10 Value Units - E026BLL - QTY = 500

So basically we had 212,900 Baclient PVU's for our shop in 2009.

Icewalker makes a good point, as older equipement hits end of life and new equipment replaces it PVU licensing will begin to sting. We suspect our PVU will nearly double next year as a large blade farm refresh is taking place right now.
 
PREDATAR Control23

Choose your tools.

Overall we had 444,300 PVU's so we should have been able to negotiate a 'Better deal'. But thats moot now.

Start now and you may save yourself a nasty IBM audit shock !

Find out exactly how many PVU's for each product group (Base Client, TDP...etc) you already own. You should not need to replace those as most TSM licenses are transferrable. If you have Storage array based tools, some of those may not be transferrable.

Not knowing where we were starting from was part of my issue because someone had swapped out some of the more expensive license PVU's (LANFREE) for more PVU's on other products at the last negotiation. I was still using the products hence we were out of compliance.

You need to know exactly how many CPU cores of what type and on how many socket mother boards you are buying.

Read the PVU chart carefully. We had all Xeons down as 50PVU's/core but single cores are actually 100PVU's. Also if you are using HA on asymmetric clusters or Vmotion it gets extremely complex as it feels like you have to license all cores the product might run on not just those its active on at a given time. Enough to say you if you add HA or Vmotion you should reevaluate your licensing.

With TSM licensing you now get hit in the PVU's for buying underpopulated mobo's for certain CPU types (Specifically newer Xeons and clones). The bigger mobo's cost you more per Core but you do still save by having fewer cores.

File servers could be replaced by Netapps filers with built in snapshots and backing up with NDMP. These attract no TSM license charge (Yet!). You can also use these for Exchange and use snapshots to almost eliminate backup time. Consider Netapps built in replication to a remote site to replace TSM altogether. This can work except maybe for archives.

NDMP really needs dedicated tape drives I would recommend not more than 2 per header at present. Oh and NDMP is running on the filer CPU's so its not as fast as a top of the line Solaris or AIX server but with the right config its not too shabby either.

Suffice it to say IBM now make enough money out of product Licensing they can afford to employ KPMG as their enforcers.
 
PREDATAR Control23

^ Are you sure you are paying that price per PVU or is it per license pack? Even doing a quick search online with no negociations at all I can find $1 per PVU pricing. If you are truly paying those prices I'd find a new vendor.
 
PREDATAR Control23

Yep! I'm sure its per PVU

We deal direct with IBM for Software licenses

TSM EE basic price is $6.90 per PVU (Per passport Advantage 09/28/2010). We actually manage to get about 20% off that so that we pay about $5.50 per PVU. If you can point me at legitimate $1.00 per PVU TSM prices on the web I'll get our head of purchasing fired and you can have his job. Especially as we already had to pay for about 200,000 additional PVU's this year.

IBM knows once they have us locked into TSM they have us by the nuts so there is squat we can do. Of course if we got some management with testicular fortitude we could phase in a replacement for TSM over several years even if we just replaced it on all new installs. (But we all know that aint gonna happen cause for years i aint met a manager that has one left, let alone both).

I look forward to a new head of purchasing with better negotiating skills and a lower Golf handicap
Cheers
SC
 
PREDATAR Control23

LOL! Well.... you are making laugh and making me nervous at the same time. I imagine you are an Enterprise Edition customer as well so what is the part number of the baclient code that you are ordering?

As mentioned above, we purchase our baclient code under "TSM Extended Ed 10 Value Units - E029ELL" and it comes out to just a hair over $1 per PVU. Am I missing something? Do I need another license to back up a run of the mill web server?

A quick search for TSM + E029ELL + PRICE produced the following link reporting:

*** $11 for 10 PVU for 1 year:

http://www.vecmar.com/IBM_Tivoli_St...tion_and_Support_Renewal/E029ELL-J/p/S4366238

I have no idea what your volume level would be but considering you purchased twice as much as I did it should be better than what we get.
 
PREDATAR Control23

Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid, In IBM Audit space no one can hear you scream.

The Products you are buying are software subscription renewals and annual support agreements for software. They do NOT include an initial license entitlement.

Basically you are paying for year 2 onwards support but that is all. The Initial entitlement is only included in the First year license. Part# D56FELL In theory you need one of these before you can renew Year 2 and beyond. And IBM or your VAR will be tracking your entitlement.

We recalculated and paid our licenses last year and then IBM showed up with KPMG in tow this year ( We got hit for 200,000 extra PVU's because they have changed the way they evaluate VMWARE, Vmotion clusters and HA clusters, plus somone swapped licenses I was using for other entitlements. Oh and the guy who worked it out last year missed that a single core Xeon was 100PVU )

If you didnt buy licenses D56FELL or some similar entitlement in the past. I would make sure you know exactly what you have hardware wise, work out how much you owe IBM, and then talk to your management because it sounds like you might have a large bill ahead of you. (and no you aren't a Toucan)

SC
 
PREDATAR Control23

Well it took a bit of digging and I even called our IBM rep but I found that we originally purchased about 1000 processor licenses back in 2006. IBM some how worked their magic during the PVU conversion and gave us enough new client PVU to support about 1000 dual core servers. The big money saver has turned out to be our P2V push.

By moving 60% of the previous physical machines to virtual machines we have compressed nearly 40 physical machines into one VM Host license. Any new physical machines reuse one of the 39 reclaimed previously purchased new client licenses. Therefore no need to purchase new client licenses as they were previously purchase and had continuous support on them.

In a way its quite slick. Every one of our VM clients have a baclient but we license the host not individual clients. As for VMotion, all of our VM clients are VMotion capable but since every host already has a TSM license we don't need to do anything extra!

This has left us with many extra client licenses to reuse for new physical machines. Looking at the numbers it was cheaper to continue to pay for support on unused baclient licenses than drop support and later pay for new client licenses. We still have hundreds of free client licenses floating around.
 
PREDATAR Control23

Happy for you!

You clearly have a way better negotiators than we do. We had a 5000 CPU license and that along with all the previously purchased standalone licenses somehow got converted to into just 500PVU's more than the 2000 or so cores we had active when it was Swapped for PVUs.

The bean counters do our negotiation direct with the IBM Software Rep and they won't allow us techies or even the VAR who originally sold us the licenses into the negotiations. This means our management never even have a clue what they gave away. But the negotiators do protect their little empire so its all cool with their mgt.

SC.
 
PREDATAR Control23

Even I have seen TSM projects/servers moving to netbackup,HPDP etc due to cost...

Management mind easily alters with $$$$$$
I strongly think that IBM should reconsider their pricing.........otherwise TSM market share will sink for sure
 
PREDATAR Control23

I thought some of you who contributed to this thread might find a follow-up interesting. We're still a TSM shop here, but maybe not for long. We recently dropped Domino and migrated to Exchange and are dropping Websphere soon. Shortly after we renewed with these changes, IBM initiated an audit. Coincidence? I don't think so.

So the auditors (who obviously had very little technical understanding of infrastructure in general) wasted a bunch of our time asking irrelevant and/or repetitive questions and having us fill out what may have been the most convoluted spreadsheet I've ever seen, they ran off to write their report. A couple months later, they come back showing we are WAY out of compliance.

So I go through the audit and realize (similar to shcart) that the inflated numbers are from them not properly following sub-capacity licensing rules. We're currently waiting for a response after pointing that out. If it's anything other than "our bad, sorry for wasting your valuable time", I think we'll be taking a VERY strong look at moving away from our remaining IBM products (TSM, Cognos - don't even get me started on this debacle -, etc).

As a comparison - we just looked at true-ing up our Microsoft licensing, which offers either per-socket/CPU or Server+CAL models. We were able to do the audit and make a clear-cut decision in about, oh, 2 hours. Microsoft are no angels themselves, but at this point I'd much rather be doing business with them than IBM and, more importantly, so would my superiors.

IBM - if you're reading this, get your sh*t together.

Oh, almost forgot - I noticed, as was mentioned above, the new PVU charts where you actually end up paying more to backup a server with 4 sockets than 2, even if only 1-2 sockets are populated. W. T. F.
 
PREDATAR Control23

Even if it costs more.... TSM works and that is my number one concern. I have never worked with another product as powerful and relieable as TSM. It is my feeling that our TSM agents give every server a individual health check every day. I love TSM!

I would go to war with managment if they even suggested we move away from TSM.
 
PREDATAR Control23

I Totally Agree, TSM is the best backup enterprise s/w in the market but if IBM can reduce licensing price then for sure there will be only one backup s/w in market i.e. TSM
 
PREDATAR Control23

OK so the concensus is TSM is the best product in the enterprise space, however IBM are pricing it out of the market. What are our alternatives ? I have a number of customers now reviewing multiple backup solutions, VEEAM for the VM's, Netbackup for the satellites and primative point solutions for DBMs' which of course are not even close to a TSM type solution but they are hundreds of thousands of dollars cheaper( quote this week for 1 tsmee client and 1 Oracle TDP to run in one container on a SUN m5000 was $82k per annum, another who have had TSM since ADSM who's first license was $23k this years bill -- still being argued was over $250k...WTF). Are other TSM sites finding affordable alternatives or some method of counting the PVU's that make it cost justifiable to keep it?. I see my next couple of contracts being migrations off TSM simply because the a business case cannot be made to continue using it.
 
PREDATAR Control23

Just thought I would bring this back from the dead. Last year we moved to the TB of primary storage licensing approach. We are currently at 400TB of primary storage. Did the easy math and that came up to about $3200 per TB of TSM primary storage. That's more than we are paying for the disk that it sits on.

After reporting this up the food chain people are really scrambling.... The number crunchers are saying that is way high! But its high compared to what? Does anyone know what the other top three solutions cost?
 
PREDATAR Control23

Just thought I would bring this back from the dead. Last year we moved to the TB of primary storage licensing approach. We are currently at 400TB of primary storage.

For my interest sake, what was cheaper:
- PVU licensing
- SUR (per TB) licensing

Cheers
 
PREDATAR Control23

What's up with IBM license pricing being insanely high? I know for us it doesn't help when the Netbackup reps are willing to give their product away (free Crap is still Crap!). I've heard of numerous HUGE accounts looking into Netbackup, and with Symantec basically giving it away, how do you stop management from considering it? With IBM's pricing out of control it doesn't help. I sure hope IBM reconsiders their pricing...it's forcing people off of TSM. :mad:

Look into the Unified Recovery cost model if you haven't already. We saw significant savings.
 
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