Home > Updates > 10 August 2004 Update (this page)

On 10 August 2004 IBM announced additional sub-capacity terms for some IPLA products. The pricing has not changed, but the calculation of “required license capacity” may change and this can lead to lower prices. The “required license capacity” for these products is measured in MSUs. Determining the charge requires converting the MSUs to “Value Units”. There are a number of different formulas to convert MSUs to Value Units. Each product's announcement typically includes the value unit conversion table for the product. (LCS calculates Value Units from MSUs and provides reporting. You can also use IBM's Value Unit Converter Tool).

There are now three different terms and methods used as the MSU base of the calculations.

Execution-based Products

The 4-hour rolling averages for these IPLA products are reported directly by SCRT. Previously only 15 IPLA were reported by SCRT, now the list includes 45 products. Significance: Through SCRT's NO89 parameters or actual execution information these products are now reported at an LPAR level, rather than a machine level.

Reference-based Products

The MSUs for these products are determined by referencing a “Parent” Product's MSUs. The DB2 tools MSUs are based on a reference to the DB2 4-hour rolling averages as reported by SCRT. (Previously the DB2 tools MSUs were based on the z/OS 4-hour rolling averages). Note that this is the amount of DB2 MSUs in the sysplex. CICS and IMS are also “parent” product and have related tools. Significance: Continuing the DB2 example, if DB2 is in one LPAR of a machine that has three LPARs then only the MSUs of DB2 in it's LPAR are used rather than the MSUs of z/OS in all three LPARs.

z/OS-based Products

Products in this group use the z/OS or z/OS.e 4-hour rolling average as reported by SCRT.

More information is available in IBM announcement 204-184, on IBM's Software Pricing website, and in particular in the 'IPLA' section of the zSeries Exhibits website.

All IPLA products aggregate across the enterprise. When IBM processes your SCRT reports they will add together all the MSU amounts for a product to determine the “required license capacity” in MSUs. This will be compared to the products “entitled license capacity” which is the amount of each product that were specified when the product was acquired. If the “required license capacity” for an IPLA product is greater than your “entitled license capacity” IBM will consider that you “ordering” more value units for the product.

LCS detects any shortfalls and this is included in the LCS IPLA Enterprise report providing an early indication that the next IBM invoice will include more value units for a particular product.

If your site is planning to acquire any IPLA products this announcement should lower the software cost. For example if you were planning to acquire IBM's Fault Analyzer for z/OS, an Execution-base IPLA Product, before this announcement you would have used the MSUs of the z/OS for the entire machine, and now you can acquire it based only the MSUs of the LPARs where it will be used.

If you already have these IPLA products and the “required license capacity” is reduced through these changes there is no refund or credit available from IBM. You can use this excess “required license capacity” to cover future growth or anywhere in the enterprise where the tools are not currently licensed.

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