IBM Spectrum Licensing

Software Licensing IBM Licensing
1

Can anyone share insights on IBM spectrum licensing?

In particular:

  1. Whether licensing will be counted if it was discovered 3 months prior
  2. Any license requirement for Dev / Test
  3. How to optimise

Thanks!

2

Martin,

Interesting question.

Firstly, I would suggest review of the IBM LI for your specific products as spectrum encompasses multiple products. Spectrum Protection Suite

For an IBM perspective if this was discovered 3 month ago but was promptly removed you could log an exclusion in your ILMT instance; however, if it is still present and in use then your onus would be to license it.

With respect to Non-Production (test/dev), most of the Spectrum line of products require a full license under RVU/PVU; however, there is at least one Spectrum product that has non-production skus (Spectrum Accelerat). Note that the best source of truth on this would be in the LI documents referenced above.

Could you expand on the how to optimize question? For the most part Spectrum licenses are measured by a capacity metric. Thus you would need to efficiently manage those capacities to optimize the licenses. As normal, I would determine if the product is needed, how it is/was provisioned, etc. Good luck and let me know how it goes.

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3

Hey Martin,

IBM Spectrum is a big product family with products such as Spectrum Protect, Spectrum Control, Spectrum Storage Suite etc. I’m not sure which product are you looking into here.

For Spectrum Protect, if you are licensing on TB metric, most of the time capacity of primary storage pool & fastback repositories is chargeable. There are IBM specified administrative macros available which can be used to measure deployment numbers depending on the product edition (Front End, Back End). E.g. https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/measuring-backend-capacity-primary-server-storage-pools

For Spectrum Protect PVU & Client Device metrics, we do not consider the devices that have not backed up successfully in last 90 days towards deployment even if they are active/powered-on.

For Control, you can see the SCUs/TBs directly from the Licence Compliance page of the application GUI.

For TB/SCU metrics, the deployment would be point-in-time so no need to worry of 90 days rule. This is only to be taken care when you are licensing the product on PVU/Client Device.

I work on compliance audits side so don’t have much insights around optimising. Hope the above info will be of some help.

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