How licensing values are calculated

Learn about how the capacity to be licensed and the number of enclosure licenses that are needed for your storage systems are calculated.

Calculating the number of enclosure licenses for your storage systems

For each enclosure, the number of licenses that are needed is calculated by using the following rules. Calculations are rounded up to the nearest whole number.
  1. The number of slots in the enclosure divided by 25.
  2. The sum of the physical capacity of the disks in the enclosure divided by 500 TiB.
  3. The higher number from rule 1 and rule 2 is the number of licenses that are needed for the enclosure.

Examples of the enclosure licensing calculations.

Rule 1 - Number of slots in the storage enclosures (or modules or expansions) that are managed:
  • Enclosure with 12 slots requires 1 license.
  • Enclosure with 92 slots requires 4 licenses.
Rule 2 - Sum of the physical capacity of the disks in the enclosure:
  • Enclosure with 200 TiB requires 1 license.
  • Enclosure with 1,250 TiB requires 3 licenses.
Example of a storage system with 4 enclosures:
Enclosure Slots Rule 1 - Licenses required Capacity (TiB) Rule 2 - Licenses required Licenses required
Enclosure 1 28 2 400 1 2
Enclosure 2 92 4 3,700 8 8
Enclosure 3 60 3 1,750 4 4
Enclosure 4 16 1 225 1 1
        Total enclosure licenses required 15

Calculating the capacity to be licensed for your storage systems

Capacity to be licensed is the usable capacity of the storage systems that are being monitored and that is made available for storage consumption. Apart from IBM Storage Scale and IBM Cloud Object Storage, the capacity to be licensed is based on the usable capacity of the RAID arrays on the storage system.
Information about the calculation of capacity to be licensed:
  • Capacity that is reserved for overheads, such as RAID management is not included.
  • Data reductions savings at the storage system level, such as compression and deduplication, are not included. For storage systems that use data reduction technologies, the capacity to be licensed is the usable capacity, not the effective capacity.
  • Capacity to be licensed is the total capacity of the storage system after RAID is applied and spare disks and capacity are deducted. So, capacity to be licensed is the capacity that can be provisioned to servers, when no over-provisioning is used. Any form of cache, for example, DRAM, SSD, or flash storage is not included, and the capacity to be licensed is less than the raw capacity of the storage system.
Refer to the following information for details about how capacity to be licensed is calculated for different storage systems:
Storage virtualization systems
Capacity to be licensed is calculated for the following storage virtualizers:
  • Storage systems that run IBM Storage Virtualize, such as IBM SAN Volume Controller and IBM Storage FlashSystem 9100.
  • Non-IBM® storage systems such as Hitachi VSP.

A storage virtualizer includes capacity from other storage systems. Capacity from back-end storage systems that are not monitored by IBM Spectrum Control is counted in the capacity to be licensed of the virtualizer. Capacity from back-end storage systems that are monitored by IBM Spectrum Control is not counted. The license for the monitored back-end storage is recorded separately and has its own record on the Licensing page.

For storage virtualizers that have internal capacity, such as IBM Storwize V7000, IBM Storage FlashSystem 7200, and IBM Storage FlashSystem 9100, the capacity to be licensed is calculated as: 
sum of the physical capacity of the internal RAID arrays + 
sum of the capacity of the external MDisks from unmonitored back-end systems
For storage virtualizers that do not have internal capacity, such as some models of IBM SAN Volume Controller, the capacity to be licensed is calculated as:
sum of the capacity of the external MDisks from unmonitored back-end systems
Block and file storage systems
The capacity to be licensed is the sum of the physical capacity of the RAID arrays on the storage system.
Exception: For IBM FlashSystem A9000, IBM FlashSystem A9000R, and IBM XIV Storage System, the capacity to be licensed is the overall physical capacity of the storage system.
For the following storage systems, the capacity and enclosure license information is not calculated because IBM Spectrum Control does not collect the RAID array information from the device. The value Unavailable is shown in the SCU and Capacity to be Licensed columns on the Licensing page.
  • Block and file storage systems that are managed by SMI-S providers. For example:
    • NetApp Data ONTAP 8.1
    • Dell EMCVMAX, VNX, and VNXe
    • Hitachi VSP F series
To get a complete picture of your licensing requirements, complete the following tasks for these storage systems:
  • If the storage system is licensed by enclosure, you must manually enter the number of enclosure licenses. The value is then automatically included in the Total Enclosure Licenses value in the summary area at the top of the page.
  • If the storage system is licensed by capacity, you must manually calculate the SCUs that you need for the storage system. Then, add that value to the Total SCU value in the summary area.
IBM Storage Scale storage systems
The capacity to be licensed is the sum of the capacity of the Network Shared Disks (NSDs) that are assigned to the file system pools.

NSD capacity from back-end storage systems that are not monitored by IBM Spectrum Control is included.

The following capacity is not included in the capacity to be licensed:
  • NSDs that are not assigned to a pool.
  • NSD capacity from back-end storage systems that are monitored by IBM Spectrum Control. The license for the monitored back-end storage is recorded separately and has its own record on the Licensing page.
  • NSD capacity on external pools.
For IBM Storage Scale storage systems that are configured for file and object storage, the capacity to be licensed for the object storage is included in the file system pool capacity and is not counted separately.
Don't forget to assign the storage category for your file system pools: The storage category is based on the technology type of the drives in the pool, for example, Storage Class Memory and Flash, and is used in the calculation of SCU usage. To ensure that the correct storage category is used, assign the storage category on the Licensing page.

If the storage category is not set, IBM Spectrum Control assumes, for the calculations of SCU usage, that Category 1 drives are used.

Calculating enclosure licenses for IBM Spectrum Scale: For IBM Storage Scale storage systems that are licensed by enclosure, you need one enclosure license for each NSD server node that is connected to NSDs.
IBM Cloud Object Storage systems
The capacity to be licensed is the sum of the capacity of the COS Slicestor® nodes in IBM Cloud Object Storage.
Don't forget to assign the storage category for your virtual COS Slicestor nodes: The storage category is based on the technology type of the drives in the node, for example, Storage Class Memory and Flash, and is used in the calculation of SCU usage. A COS Slicestor node can be a server or a virtual appliance. For the server nodes, IBM Spectrum Control automatically assigns the Near-Line drive category. For virtual appliances, IBM Spectrum Control cannot determine the storage category of the drives in the node.

For the calculation of SCU usage for the node, IBM Spectrum Control assumes that Category 1 drives are used in the virtual appliance. To ensure that the correct storage category is used in the calculations, assign the storage category on the Licensing page for each virtual node.

Calculating enclosure licenses for IBM Cloud Object Storage
To calculate the number of enclosure licenses, the same rules that are specified in Calculating the number of enclosure licenses for your storage systems are used.
For the calculation:
  • Each COS Slicestor node is treated as an enclosure.
  • Instead of enclosure slots, the calculation uses the number of drives in the node.
  • The capacity is based on the total capacity of the drives in the node.
Example of IBM Cloud Object Storage with 3 COS Slicestor nodes:
Nodes Drives Rule 1 - Licenses required Capacity (TiB) Rule 2 - Licenses required Licenses required
Node 1 16 1 400 1 1
Node 2 64 3 2,400 5 5
Node 3 32 2 350 1 2
        Total enclosure licenses required 8