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back to article Licensed to BILL: How much should you cough for software licences?

“Yet another change to a licensing model. You can bet it’s not going to work out any cheaper for me," was the first thought that flickered through my mind during a presentation about GPFS 4.1 at the GPFS UG meeting in London. This started up another train of thought: in this new world of software-defined storage, how should …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "and I will simply point out that Red Hat makes quite a lot of money out of open source"

    Quite - our Red Hat licensing / support costs a lot more than the equivalent Windows Server options. Hence partly why we tend to migrate away from legacy / UNIX type platforms. They almost always seem to have a higher TCO except perhaps in certain niche roles.

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    1. vagabondo
      Reply Icon

      apples - oranges ?

      Are you comparing the cost of a licences to use Microsoft software with the price of Red Hat support? Or have you factored in the cost of equivalent technical incident responses?

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    2. silent_count
      Reply Icon

      @Steve

      Now that you've handed over the reins to Mr Nadella, it must be nice having the free time to focus on your monkey-dancing lessons, and posting anonymous drivel in this forum.

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  2. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge

    Computer says no

    making the licensing cost variable in a Software Defined Storage environment will IMHO inevitable lead to

    'I'm sorry Dave, I can't let you do that'

    Then in the very small print underneath it says

    'credit card declined'

    Naturally it will happen just when you need a lot of extra space to recover from an outage or some other foopah.

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  3. Bronek Kozicki

    depends

    For appliance, that should depend on its "capacity" however you define it.

    For software (not bound to any specific platform), that should depend on level of support you require.

    There is world between these two, but discussion on the topic may raise controversy so I simply ignore it :)

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  4. Version 1.0 Silver badge
    IT Angle

    The twitter generation?

    This is a rubbish article, unworthy of El Reg - it's badly written and uninformative to anyone who's not in this specific game. Back to journalism school with you - assuming that you ever attended one.

    If you are going to use acronyms then expand them and explain why your story might be of interest to the general reader - there is an element of education to journalism that requires that you write a story that at least provides some background to the reader to give them the desire to read your article. Otherwise it's just a personal rant and will only be read and understood by a few people. If I didn't love El Reg I would even bother saying this - you have the potential of a good story and discussion here and you blew it.

    5 3
    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: The twitter generation?

      I think you misunderstand the point of Storagebod....it is a rant, it is not journalism.

      It is a repost of a blog written by someone who works in the industry at the coal-face. It doesn't pretend to be anything more than opinion. If you want journalism, read Chris' articles; they are much better researched..

      Storagebod, it's just someone scratching an itch.

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  5. M. B.

    I hate...

    ...software licensing. Its usually responsible for the sky-high quotes you see on the first round of pricing. I remember fondly asking our Dell rep about what features were licensed with our first EqualLogic array and he said "well, all of it". Nimble is the same. I believe HP is the same with the StoreVirtual (nee LeftHand) stuff.

    I really don't have the stomach or the time for sorting through quotes to find out what licensed features or software need to be massaged down or out of the quote to hit price points. I especially hate per-spindle or per GB/TB costs thrown in on top of the the array and software costs. It's what I hate most about dealing with EMC, NetApp, HP 3PAR, and many others. Then I show it to a customer and they walk away from the deal, or buy the Nimble option.

    Here, I'm going to go into my quoting tools and work up a few things to show you how much of the cost is wasted on this stuff. No specifics, just some general percentages.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: I hate...

      Some years ago we tendered for storage and received a wide range of quotes, and one factor that swung us in favour of the (then) Sun storage system was the fact you had a fixed selling price with all features included which was very unlike, for example NetApp. This mattered a lot because:

      (a) we don't want to have issues in future with compliance to the terms

      (b) we were not sure of what we might use. Sure we needed NFS, but CIFS? In our case maybe useful, maybe not. If we had to pay more, the answer would have been a definite 'no'.

      So really when it comes to selling we want a simple up-front cost and not strange complex variations depending on just what we do with the system.

      Really, for storage it should be as simple as possible, such as how much usable capacity, and then what level of support you need. Anything else and they are simply looking for ways to gouge you.

      p.s. Of course Oracle changed that, but we are trying to get out of their grasp as soon as practical.

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  6. M. B.

    Ouch...

    ...34% of the array total cost from one vendor is in just software licenses/features (that are advertised in a manner which would indicate it is included with the base), that's the average of three customer quotes for the same model of device.

    Vendor 2 works out to roughly 32% of the total array cost in just software bundles.

    That's terrible, they should feel bad.

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  7. proud2bgrumpy

    Software Licencing is ALWAYS the biggest cost in IT that you can actually do something about, HW costs are trivial in comparison (although the choice of platform type will directly affect your SW costs).

    Of course, you SW supplier isn't going to give you your money back if you migrate to a different OS & HW platform, but if you've signed up to an All-You-Can-Eat-Fully-Inclusive-Five-Star SW ULA, then you'd better hope that your Ryan-Air-Software-Supplier doesn't want to weigh you before you get on the plane for the trip home and charge a few $M for every pound you gained while pigging out on your Free-Software-Buffet...

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