Allen S. Rout wrote:

On Wed, 7 Feb 2007 10:11:03 +1000, Steven Harris <steve AT STEVENHARRIS DOT 
INFO> said:

Again, the product has not been enhanced to automatically collect
and maintain this information, providing a significant overhead for
administrators and a lack of assurance that licencing is *ever*
correct.  Sure IBM has the right to change their licencing model,
but they should also provide tools to do the job efficiently and
effectively and provide an audit function to allow customers to know
they are correctly licensed.

I expect that they will offer the function you describe with the same
despatch they displayed w.r.t. per-processor licensing.  In their
defense, I understand why they don't want to put developers on this
kind of work: their license schemes chance more quickly than they
could get a new tool to market.

Since we can prove we can never know the right number, I suggest not
worring about it too much, making a reasonable stab at it, and being
prepared to argue with your business partner.  And don't be afraid to
say "Virtualization!"  (with the same sort of affect as "Boo!" at
halloween) when they walk into the room.  That ought to give you
-years- of smokescreen.



My uninformed estimate is that TSM has their organizational hands tied
by some larger marketing effort for Tivoli-brand-wide licensing
standards unification.  Since these are acknowledged marketing
fantasies anyway, the Tivoli folks are not concerned with actual
measuring, because the list price is only interesting as an initial
bargaining position. When the error-bars on the offered price are 40%,
+/- 10% processor count gets lost in the noise.  If they ever tried to
extract list price * processor units, they'd get laughed out of the
room, and they know it.

Worse yet, if they made measurement straightforward, then Backup Exec
would run "The IBM-supplied costing tool" against some pile of
hardware, multiply it by IBM list price, and have a very reasonable
claim to have arrived at an IBM approved cost number, at which they
could throw smelly objects on YouTube or some other high-visibility
location.

So we end up with licensing that is not only opaque by design, but
also measured against a nearly irrelevant basis (for TSM, you count
processors?).  I construe that as a statement by Tivoli management
that we don't need to get the measures any more right than they do,
and we can correct course at triannual marketing meetings.



- Allen S. Rout
- Can you tell I'm grumpy about this?

Hi Allen

I'm not so sure about this.  One of our customers took a rather cavalier
attitude to TSM licencing, and were using about 3 times as many licences
as they'd paid for.  IBM via PriceWaterhouseCoopers came in one day
(possibly triggered by the fact that there had been no new orders for
licences in a couple of years) and demanded an audit.  Said company then
had to pony up for all the extra licences *at FULL LIST price*.  No
negotiation  and no questions accepted.  The alternative would have
involved lawyers and therefore cost a lot more.

Now this was not a company with a huge installation of IBM gear, they
had absolutely no leverage; but that is exactly the situation that most
of our customers are in.  They don't understand the Byzantine world of
TSM licensing and expect us to tell them whether they have it right or
not.  We on the other hand have no idea of the hardware on a particular
box and indeed this can change at any time as customers swap images
around.  Even if you are on site (and mostly we work remotely) its still
very hard to tell what is actually installed in any given machine.  On
Windows, AFAIK you can't even tell if there are two  real  CPUs in
hyperthreading mode or four CPUs in a given box. With AIX you can tell
down to the CPU serial number others I'm not sure.  Now trying to tell
whats running on what core in today's Dynamically
Parititioned/VMed/Zoned/XENed world is damn near impossible.
Spreadsheets won't cut it any more and if a client were to get a big
bill and sue us for not advising them properly...  We're a small company
and it might well sink us.

Regards

Steve.

Steve Harris
AIX and TSM Admin
Brisbane Australia.