OnCommand Balance - How Legacy Capacity-Based Licenses Work

[bschramm]

As of October 31, 2013, OnCommand Balance, is now only sold for NetApp storage via a controller-based license.  Previously, OnCommand Balance, was licensed either in a capacity-based license or a controller-based license (for supported NetApp controllers), and, did support heterogeneous (3rd party) storage arrays.  Customers owning capacity-based licenses are still able to use those licenses, even for supported heterogeneous storage arrays.  Please note; however, capacity-based, and heterogeneous-based, licenses are no longer available for sale; this includes new licenses, as well as, adding capacity to an existing license.

For those that currently own OnCommand Balance, capacity-based licenses; here is how the product counts capacity.

For NetApp arrays without a controller license, we count their capacity against the capacity license.

For ALL arrays, we check the I/O topology for each diskgroup/aggregate: if we can trace an I/O topology back up to a LUN or a volume on a Server then we count that diskgroup’s capacity towards the capacity license.

For NetApp, we collect aggr-list-info via ZAPI and use the size-total and size-used attributes to determine used capacity.  Both of these are usable capacities, not raw capacities.

For other vendors:

• Engenio: usable
• EqualLogic: usable
• HP EVA: usable
• HP 3PAR: usable
• Hitachi: raw (from code inspection, not 100% sure of this)
• IBM DS series: usable
• IBM ESS series: usable
• IBM XIV: usable
• EMC Symmetrix: raw
• EMC CLARiiON: usable, but if there is no formatted capacity then total free capacity is reported raw