‘*sigh* Another change to a licensing model and you can bet it’s not going to work out any cheaper for me’ was the first thought that flickered through my mind during a presentation about GPFS 4.1 at the GPFS UG meeting in London (if you are a GPFS user in the UK, you should attend this next time…probably the best UG meeting I’ve been at for a long time).
This started up another train of thought; in this new world of Software Defined Storage, how should the software be licensed? And how should the value be reflected?
Should we be moving to a capacity based model?
Should I get charged per terabyte of storage being ‘managed’?
Or perhaps per server that has this software defined storage presented to it?
Perhaps per socket? Per core?
But this might not work well if I’m running at hyperscale?
And if I fully embrace a programmatic provisioning model that dynamically changes the storage configuration…does any model make any sense apart from some kind of flat-fee, all-you-can-eat model.
Chatting to a few people; it seems that no-one really has any idea what the licensing model should look like. Funnily enough; it is this sort of thing which could really de-rail ServerSAN and Software Defined Storage; it’s not going to be a technical challenge but if the licensing model gets too complex, hard to manage and generally too costly, it is going to fail.
Of course inevitably someone is going to pop-up and mention Open-Source…and I will simply point out, RedHat make quite a lot of money out of Open-Source; you pay for support based on some kind of model. Cost of acquisition is just a part of IT infrastructure spend.
So what is a reasonable price? Anyone?
