Green if but for the licenses
By Simon Bisson & Mary Branscombe in Editorial
Posted in virtualisation, Licensing, Software, Applications, Hardware, Microsoft on
Getting IT folk to agree is like herding squirrels, but there’s one thing we do seem to agree on, and that’s that virtualisation is a good thing. It saves money, it saves space, and above all, it saves energy. Throw in a bunch of offload processing for complex applications (a Tesla box or some Azul hardware) and you’re well on the way to a shiny green data centre.
With so many companies investing so much in virtualisation you’d think that software companies would be falling over themselves to develop licensing tools to support dynamic, flexible IT infrastructures. It’s surprising then to see that not only are they singularly failing to do so, but they’re also making it hard to justify installing software on a virtualised server. Microsoft has tried to appear to be a poster child for virtualisation licensing, but once you start drilling down into just what you can and can’t do with Hyper-V and the Windows Server 2008 Enterprise edition you’re in for an unpleasant surprise. Unless you’re ready to lock yourself into an Oracle-style site license there’s just no way to run your internal IT as a utility.
That’s good news for SaaS vendors like Salesforce.com, but it’s bad news for CIOs all around the world - and (in the long run) worse news for proprietary software developers. Why worry about falling over a hole in your Windows Server 2008 licence if all you really need is a set of virtualised Linux boxen running Apache, MySQL and PHP/Python/Perl. Fractional licensing is water off a duck’s back to open source and free software.
So what do proprietary software vendors need to do? First and foremost they need to realise that the landscape has radically shifted. Microsoft made one step in the right direction when it realised that cores didn’t equal CPUs and switched its licence model to handle the change in server architectures. It was quickly followed by much of the industry. Now the industry as a whole needs to accept that a server is an ephemeral construct which is tied to a purpose not to a specific piece of hardware, and businesses will need to be licensed either for a maximum number of live instances or for a total number of licenses over a set amount of time.
Why should a company by three server licences if it’s actually only going to have two live at any one time? Two licences should be sufficient. Of course there’s also the issue of disaster recovery, but those purchased licenses should also be able to handle snapshot images of the virtualised servers that are ready to be put into play at a moment’s notice.
At VMworld, back in February, BT’s Stefan van Overtveldt said that vendors weren’t ready for virtualisation licensing. As he said, “On a generic level what I would say is as I come from a software background myself I understand that it’s very hard for software vendors to look at different types of commercial agreements because tracking usage is harder than tracking physical copies”. It’s a perennial problem that goes back to the days of the mainframe - and one that vendors are unlikely to approach with much enthusiasm, especially as most businesses are actually over-licensed.
Any shift to fractional licensing will be likely to result in lower revenues (at least in the first instance), but even so, van Overtveldt is optimistic, and expects vendors to come up with appropriate tools and licenses, “The industry hasn’t come up with standards that say if you transmit this kind of data in this format we will track it and reduce your licensing costs automatically when you get below a certain level of usage. But I believe something will come.”
Let’s hope he’s right.
–Simon
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