Capacity-based licensing

You can use capacity-based licensing to license IBM Spectrum Scale™ based on the storage capacity being managed in an IBM Spectrum Scale cluster.

The storage capacity to be licensed is the capacity in terabytes (TiB) from all NSDs in the IBM Spectrum Scale cluster. The capacity to be licensed is not affected by using functions such as replication or compression or by doing tasks such as creating or deleting files, file systems, or snapshots.

For example, if you have 100 TiB of capacity from all NSDs in the IBM Spectrum Scale cluster and if you have set the replication factor to 2, for 50 TiB of application data, 100 TiB of disk capacity is consumed. In this case, the capacity to be licensed is 100 TiB, not 50 TiB.

The capacity to be licensed changes only when an NSD is added or deleted from the IBM Spectrum Scale cluster.

You can view the cluster capacity for licensing by using one of the following methods:

• Select the About option from the menu that is available in the upper right corner of the IBM Spectrum Scale management GUI.
• Issue the mmlslicense --capacity command.

Capacity-based licensing can be used only with IBM Spectrum Scale Data Management Edition. The Data Management Edition provides identical functionality as the Advanced Edition.

Capacity-based licensing can also be used to license an Elastic Storage Server (ESS) system. For ESS, the capacity to be licensed is the capacity after applying IBM Spectrum Scale RAID. The exact capacity to be licensed depends on the RAID code selected, 8+2p or 8+3p.