Licensed functions

The base license that is provided with your system includes the use of its basic functions. However, there are also extra licenses that can be purchased to expand the capabilities of your system. Administrators are responsible for purchasing extra licenses and configuring the systems within the license agreement, which includes configuring the settings of each licensed function on the system.

The system supports both differential and capacity-based licensing. For virtualization and compression functions, differential licensing charges different rates for different types of storage, which provides cost effective management of capacity across multiple tiers of storage. Licensing for these functions are based on the number of storage capacity units (SCUs) purchased. With other functions, like remote mirroring and FlashCopy®, the license grants a specific number of terabytes for that function.

The system supports the following licensing models:

Standard Edition: This model is based on the total number of terabytes (TB) that the system is licensed for FlashCopy and remote-copy functions. Virtualization and Real-time Compression™ use the differential licensing scheme. The Real-time Compression limit is the total virtual capacity of all the compressed volumes in the system.

Differential licensing

Differential licensing is the term used to refer to the measurement of virtualization and compression licenses, where different types of storage are charged at different rates. Differential licensing is a license unit within the SAN Volume Controller standard edition license. Differential licensing uses a storage capacity unit (SCU)-based license scheme for virtualization and compression licenses. For each SCU, a client is entitled to manage different amounts of usable capacity based on a storage category classification. Table 1 identifies the storage categories and SCU ratios for each category.

Table 1. Storage capacity unit categories and ratios
Storage category	Included storage types	SCU ratio
1	Flash and solid-state drives (SSDs)	1 SCU equates to 1.00 TB usable of Category 1 storage
2	Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives and Fibre Channel drives	1 SCU equates to 1.18 TB usable of Category 2 storage
3	Nearline SAS (NL-SAS) and Serial ATA (SATA) drives	1 SCU equates to 4.00 TB usable of Category 3 storage

Table 2 provides an example of how SCU licensing might work based on category types.

Table 2. Example of SCU usage
Storage category	TB usable	SCU ratio	Total SCUs
1	42	1	42
2	400®	1.18	339
3	800	4	200
Totals	1242		581

Data reduction pool licensing

Customers with base licenses and full bundle licenses (if they have a valid software maintenance agreement entitlement for upgrading to 8.1 or later) are entitled to the new data reduction pools capabilities.

The base license entitles the client to the following functions:

Create data reduction pools
Use thin provisioning
Use unmap
Use deduplication
Use compression in data reduction pools
Note: Real-time compression remains an optional feature that can be licensed. SAN Volume Controller uses SCU licensing for virtualization and compression as previously described.

In addition to these licensing models, the system also supports encryption through a key-based license. Key-based licensing requires an authorization code to activate encryption on the system. Only certain models of nodes support encryption, so verify that you have the appropriate model before purchasing a license for encryption. During system setup, you can activate the license using the authorization code. The authorization code is sent with the licensed function authorization documents that you receive after purchasing the license. Encryption is activated on a per system basis and an active license is required for each node that uses encryption. During system setup, the system detects the nodes that support encryption and a license should be applied to each. If additional nodes are added and require encryption, additional encryption licenses need to be purchased and activated.