 |
|
|
 |
| Subject: BES Licensing Licensing Model Far Out of Date and Too Expensive |
 |
| Feedback Type: Suggestion |
 |
 |
| Product Area: Domino Server |
 |
| Technical Area: Administration |
 |
| Platform: Windows |
 |
| Release: 8.5.1 |
 |
| Reproducible: Not applicable |
 |
 |
 |
 |
The PVU licensing model for the domino license for BES servers really needs to be changed by IBM, its cost calculation no longer fits the relative power of average server class machine available today, or even that of commonly available PC-class consumer desktops.
Because of the fact that almost all new windows servers now come with at least 8 cores, to purchase the Domino license underlying the BES, we were looking at in excess of $20,000 USD’s to buy the IBM license for one BES. The BES license from RIM is a few grand tops.
That very high cost is for a domino server that syncs RIM state databases; it doesn’t provide user facing services per se, nor does it host other applications, nor mail. The BES’ cannot really be successfully virtualized given the very high i/o requirements for a BES, so the idea that you could carve your expense down that way does not seem to fit. Add a fault tolerant environment to the picture and this gets really expensive, really fast.
That kind of cost for a domino mail server that I can then partition and use for hundreds/thousands of users is a reasonable investment. That kind of costs for a BES that can handle maybe 1000 users at maximum, particularly after it has to have 1/2 of the CPU resources disabled simply because of an out of date licensing model, is way too expensive.
IBM does provide the option to do sub capacity licensing to decrease these costs, but that then requires you physically disable some of the cores AND implement ILMT (IBM License Metric Tool) to make sure you are on the up and up.
That then adds to your hardware and associated costs, because you have to buy the lowest end server you can, then be forced to turn off 1/2 of the cores in BIOS due to this licensing conundrum, so that immediately decreases the cost/performance proposition per box and inherent scalability for that server, which leads to the need for more hardware to service the same population.
To add icing to the cake, ILMT requires its own server as well, and agents need to be added on all the rest of your sub-cap servers to monitor cpu usage. Yet another layer and the complications another layer will bring.
More complexity, higher costs, more hardware, more stuff to manage and less scalability, all because of a PVU based licensing model that does not at all fit the average performance profile of a modern server-class machine, is an unreasonable value proposition for loyal IBM customers, and needs to be changed.
 
Feedback number WEBB8CD399 created by ~Rebecca Zenwebergjip on 12/22/2010
Status: Open
Comments:
|
| |
|
Return to top
Printer-friendly
