Planning your licensed functions
As you plan for your licensed functions, it is important to consider increases in your workload requirements. To provide more flexibility with licensing, use-based licensing is supported on the storage system.
The Base Function license is based on the entire capacity of the storage system.
The z-synergy Services and Transparent Cloud Tiering (TCT) licenses are priced based on the raw capacity of the arrays that you want to use with CKD volumes. On the other hand, the Copy Services licenses are priced based on the provisioned capacity of the storage system.
- Plan for storage space allocation. Determine your typical storage requirements and consider how much more storage you would need if you have rapid or unpredictable growth.
- Estimate the amount of capacity you need for current and future Copy Services functions. For example, consider the number of target volumes you need for FlashCopy® relationships at remote sites. As the number of FlashCopy target volumes increase, more available bandwidth of the disk system might be used by the copy process. In addition, Copy Services solutions that require multiple copies of data can also require extensive capacity storage.
Recognizing that both your storage and data requirements will increase over time and that capacity and performance planning is your responsibility, ensure that you purchase and manage your licensed functions for maximum usage. It can be more cost effective to purchase more storage capacity to ensure that the maximum usage of your licensed functions does not exceed the allowed capacity of the storage that was purchased. If the capacity is exceeded, IBM® is notified that the usage exceeds the allowed capacity on any given licensed function. You are notified by IBM and required to extend enablement of your licensed function and install a new licensed feature key.