Determining the capacity to be licensed

Determine the capacity to be licensed for the storage systems that IBM Storage Insights Pro manages in your environment.

Overview

Use the Managed Capacity page (Configuration > Managed Capacity) to understand how much capacity that you need to license for IBM Storage Insights Pro.

The Managed Capacity value at the top of the page is the sum of the Capacity to be Licensed for your managed storage systems. The Capacity to be Licensed value for each storage system is rounded up to the nearest whole number before the Managed Capacity value is calculated.

To verify that your purchased license covers the capacity that is managed, compare the value in your purchased license to the Managed Capacity value.

Check out the following video to learn how the capacity values are calculated:

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 hosts, 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.

The method by which capacity to be licensed is calculated varies among storage systems. Refer to the information that follows.

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 Storage Insights Pro is counted in the capacity to be licensed of the virtualizer. Capacity from back-end storage systems that are monitored by IBM Storage Insights Pro is not counted. The license for the monitored back-end storage is recorded separately and has its own record on the Managed Capacity 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 to be licensed is not calculated because IBM Storage Insights Pro does not collect the RAID array information from the device. The value Unavailable is shown in the Capacity to be Licensed column on the Managed Capacity page.

Block and file storage systems that are managed by SMI-S providers. For example:
- DS4000, DS5000, and DS6000
- NetApp Data ONTAP 8.1
- Dell EMCVMAX, VNX, and VNXe
- Hitachi VSP F series

To get a complete picture of your licensing requirements, you must manually add the physical capacity of the RAID arrays on the storage system to the Managed Capacity value at the top of the page.

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 Storage Insights Pro 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 Storage Insights Pro. The license for the monitored back-end storage is recorded separately and has its own record on the Managed Capacity 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.

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.

Information about storage system values

The following information is shown for each storage system on the Managed Capacity page.

Capacity to be Licensed (TiB)

The capacity that must be licensed for the storage system. Capacity that is reserved for formatting or RAID management is not included. For storage virtualizers and IBM Storage Scale, this value includes the capacity that is provided by back-end storage systems that are not being monitored by IBM Storage Insights Pro.

Capacity from back-end storage systems that are monitored by IBM Storage Insights Pro is recorded separately on the Managed Capacity page and is not included in this value.

Monitored Back-end Capacity (TiB)

For storage virtualizers and IBM Storage Scale, the capacity that is provided by back-end storage systems that are being monitored by IBM Storage Insights Pro.

This capacity is not included in the capacity to be licensed of the virtualizer or IBM Storage Scale. Each monitored back-end storage system has a separate record on the Managed Capacity page.

Unmonitored Back-end Capacity (TiB)

For storage virtualizers, the capacity that is provided by back-end storage systems that are not being monitored by IBM Storage Insights Pro. This capacity is included in the capacity to be licensed of the virtualizer. Unmonitored storage systems do not have their own record on the Managed Capacity page.

Total Capacity (TiB)

The total capacity of the storage system, including all monitored and unmonitored back-end storage.

Total Capacity = Capacity to be Licensed + Monitored Back-end Capacity