Should Software Licensing Influence your Platform Strategy?

As the old saying goes, hardware eventually breaks and software eventually works. In many organisations they are often managed as two entirely separate entities, but should software licensing influence your platform strategy?

All software packages have different licensing models. One of the most common approaches is to base it on the number of CPUs or Cores whilst some licensing is based on the number of sockets in a system.

It was all so much simpler years ago when systems had processors that got faster every two years and everyone just bought a new server with much faster processors and carried on as before. This doubling in speeds pretty much ended around the 5 GHz range* and it all became about more throughput and less about GHz. Some people still get confused between CPUs, cores and sockets so I’ll try to simplify it.

 

Sockets: A socket is where the CPU chip is connected into on a systems motherboard, and so it pretty much refers to the chip itself. Motherboards can have multiple sockets that can in turn accept multi-core chips.

CPUs and Cores: These terms are effectively the same, a core is effectively a CPU sitting on the chip (socket). As mentioned above for years, this was a one to one relationship. One chip had one CPU. All the latest chips have multiple cores inside them. So one socket (chip) may have 4 or 8 cores.

If we take that information and look at the example of a server that has two sockets each with 4 cores (8 CPUs/cores in total) versus another perhaps newer server that has two sockets each with 8 cores (16 CPUs/cores); in a licensing per socket model each of the systems would require two licenses whereas with a CPU/core base license model the difference would be 8 – 16 licenses required.

When you start to look at the different models for different software vendors (using the example above) this can have a significant impact across a server estate. Particularly when considering factoring in different virtualisation technologies, do you license against the cores allocated to each virtual machine or to the server as a whole?

We have only scratched the surface here, but the point is to demonstrate that it should definitely factor into your strategic thinking around platforms and architecture. Not just deciding which products to use in isolation, but in relation to the hardware platform, operating system and all the way up the stack. Particularly when you realise that hardware prices have come down over time whereas software and licensing costs in the main, arguably have not.

So to answer the original question: software licensing can and should drive your Server Platform thinking and strategic decisions.

*Based on IBM Power 6 Processors

Still not convinced? Then contact Celerity Limited today to find out more.

Neil Hulme, Technical Consultant. Celerity Limited

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