On Wed, May 14, 2003 at 11:47:44AM +0300, Zlatko Krastev/ACIT wrote:
> 4. Open registration of licenses.
> If the company/organization have decided to use open registration it means
> it prefers to do less planning. If there is no plan based on good usage
> predictions you should have enough <whatever> on stock to fulfil the
> demand. Either switch to well-planned configuration with precise usage
> tracking (for TSM this means closed registration) or keep a pool of
> necessary goods, materials, licenses, people, etc.
So now <collegue> sysadmin buys a box with 2 CPUs tells me it's a 2 CPU
server and later upgrades his box, is he goiing to tell me? Not very
likely. Not in a 80-person organisation like sara, evel less so in a
organisation with well over a 1000 employees.
> If we talk to something material - workstations or tapes for example, what
> can we do if there is no desktop for new staff constantly coming in or we
> run out of scratch tapes!?! Nothing better than buying new ones or findin
> out a way how to reuse existing ones.
>
And now we're decentralised. 10+ faculties, each with 10+ department
each responsible for buying their own workstations and each responsible
for maintaining their own fileserver. Let's just assume each department
has only 2 sysadmins... That's 200+ peaple to tell that they need to
keep you up to date on close to every change in their set-up. I'd need
an assistant just for keeping up with the impact of 200 sysadmins doing
their regular job....
To think that anything close to this can be achieved is naive to say the
least. Don't forget this is the type of organisation that buys M$
licences based on the number of people working for it, completely
ignoring the number of people actually using a computer to do their job
or the number of installed verions of this software.
I'd say, do a decent guess, pay for that (is the number of lan clients
TSM reports a decent guess? I'd think so), and assume IBM will not sue a
$200k+ a year paying customer becaus it cannot count the things the
license asks you to count.
> --> ... new xeon processors with hyperthreading... 2 physical processors look
> like 4 to the OS!
>
> As two processors. Physical number of processors is counted not virtual.
> Same as processors in the box are counted but not the number of TSM nodes
> you may define on it. BTW: IBM Power4 processors have hyperthreading since
> '99 but being not used in PCs this is not popular.
>
Power4 has no HT (SMT as IBM calls it has been announced for Power5),
the power4 has two actual full cores on one die, two full CPU's (shared
only at L2 cache and down).
> --> In the past, we have bought TSM client licenses in advance of need, or
> knowing where they will get used. Will one have to know when a client
> requests services if it qualifies as a server, or client, and how many
> CPU's it has, before we can buy the license?
Well, Apart from some TDP software, this is exacltly what we did. We'd
just register the client, and at the end of each period we'd tell our
supplier to sell us so many new client licenses... We couldn't possibly
wait for a suppier to sell us the licenses before starting to back-up
our very important data, could we?
>
> Not knowing where the licenses will be used does not change the rules. In
> the past you could not know will the TSM client be Tier 1 or Tier 2 and
> how many TMPs you need to have on hand. Now you do not know how many CPUs
> the TSM client will have and how many "processors" you may need. But it is
> nearly the same.
So very true. But, It's very well possible for a client to report the
number and kind of CPU's in the box. I mean, I could almost be
hard-coded in the client....
> Ask the ill-tempered administrator is he/she waiting to run out of paper
> or toner for the copier machine before to order new ones. Or is keeping
> both few packs of paper *and* spare toner cartridge on hand.
>
So now, ask him to go round campus, check 1000+ computers every day to
see if they do not change _every_ _day_. That is a bit different than
noticing that there is one more cartridge type X left in stock...
> P.S. If you read all this I would be glad to have some feedback - was it
> exhaustive, was I offensive, etc.
You're mostly right. The scale of things complicate things a bit for
some of us, and remember, TSM is the solution for HUGE environments, so
scale is almost inherent to the use of the product...
--
Remco
|
