SNOW LICENSE MANAGER 8 RELEASE NOTES

Transcription

1 SNOW LICENSE MANAGER 8 RELEASE NOTES

2 SNOW LICENSE MANAGER 8 RELEASE NOTES CONTENTS Introduction... 3 Datacenter Optimization... 4 Automated Compliance Position For Processor And Core... 5 Automatic Identification Of Minimum License Assignment Rules... 5 Automatic application of core factors relating to Microsoft and Oracle... 6 Enhanced server assignments from licenses for optimized use of the entitlement... 6 Hardware change impact on datacenter licensing... 6 Application family overview pages... 7 Transparency of Software Consumption... 8 What license covers which software and how in the datacenter... 8 Enterprise Software Vendors... 9 Simplified management of PVU full- and sub-capacity licensing... 9 Simplified Entitlement Management Oracle in the datacenter view Financial Management Reporting and alerts on unused or over-assigned licenses Trending and Forecasting Trending and forecasting of future costs User Experience User experience enhanced Known Limitations Dependencies To Other Products... 17

3 INTRODUCTION Snow License Manager 8 contains powerful new features and is the largest ever release Snow has brought to market, delivering some incredible new technology to bare that will undoubtedly help drive SAM in a smarter, more rounded way, getting in control immediately and staying there, as well as into the future with new trending and forecasting features. To that end, we have highlighted the following key areas that will be of greatest interest: Datacenter Optimization make greater savings in the place where the majority of the software spend takes place Transparency of Software Consumption ensuring organizations have complete control over how software is being consumed, regardless of platform Enterprise Software Vendors such as IBM and Oracle are known tricky areas of license management, in this release we will integrate even further into such solutions to help the customer get in better control Financial Management to ensure current software costs are kept under control Forecasting and Trending SAM intelligence for supporting decisions about the future Enhanced Management Reporting to enable all relevant stakeholders access the right data at the right time

4 DATACENTER OPTIMIZATION Detailed view on how the compliance position is calculated saves time during vendor audits Shows which use rights were applied to optimize entitlement coverage An increased number of vendors are beginning (or in some cases continuing) to look for new, inventive ways to license their products, given the new approaches that are being used by organizations to actually use those software titles within the enterprise. As a result, organizations can easily find themselves paying multiple times for software licenses that they already own, simply because they did not understand the rules associated with the entitlements and how they are calculated. This is especially the case with capacity-based licensing when mixed in with server virtualization. One license model being adopted is using processor core metrics as a means of licensing, since the vendors have determined that customers can gain significantly through the use of more powerful hardware and through virtualization techniques. Typically such vendors have expensive software titles and therefore should the organization get it wrong, it can be an extremely costly exercise. The example being that an Enterprise IT administrator can today very quickly (in a matter of minutes) stand up virtual machines running many software titles, and if they are unaware of the licensing implications of those titles on multiple different virtual machines that may be sat on different hardware, then the license requirement can differ significantly from the license entitlement, potentially opening up a very expensive mistake.

5 AUTOMATED COMPLIANCE POSITION FOR PROCESSOR AND CORE To help organizations reduce the complexity involved with managing server software, Snow License Manager automatically calculates the compliance position for processor and processor core based software based on both virtual and physical resources. Full details on each application can be displayed to the SAM Manager including details on how the compliance position was calculated together with demonstrating which use rights were applied to optimize the entitlement coverage from the available licenses. AUTOMATIC APPLICATION OF VM USE RIGHTS Server virtualization brings the risk of double licensing through the complexity that can arise through the rapid onboarding of new virtual environments. Through the automatic application of VM use rights feature, Snow License Manager 8 ensures existing entitlements are utilized to the maximum extent within fast changing virtual environments. This places the organization in control and enables it to avoid unnecessary additional costs when it comes to using virtualization. New view visualizing the consumption of the product in virtual environments Comparison of physical and virtual resources for assessment of optimal licensing AUTOMATIC IDENTIFICATION OF MINIMUM LICENSE ASSIGNMENT RULES To help organizations mitigate the risks involved with complex licensing schemes in the datacenter new functionality is introduced to automatically identify minimum license assignment rules. This is applicable to common products, such as Microsoft SQL Server, where a minimum of four licenses needs to be assigned to a virtual machine running Microsoft SQL Server, even if the virtual machine is assigned less than four cores. When the license requirement is calculated these rules are taken into account helping organizations mitigate risks of underlicensing and ensuring compliance.

6 AUTOMATIC APPLICATION OF CORE FACTORS RELATING TO MICROSOFT AND ORACLE Another area of complexity when managing products from Microsoft and Oracle is the core factors that need to be applied to each asset to assess the number of required licenses. With Snow License Manager 8 the calculation of core factors relating to Microsoft and Oracle is automatically applied with the appropriate core factor. This is a huge time saving as it removes the need for the timeconsuming calculations to be applied manually and of course should anything change with the way in which the software is used (such as different Virtual Machine or moving a VM from one server to another). It also enables the SAM Manager to identify machines with lower core factors to optimize the product location and look at what if scenarios to help with future planning. ENHANCED SERVER ASSIGNMENTS FROM LICENSES FOR OPTIMIZED USE OF THE ENTITLEMENT This feature ensures that the SAM Manager spends the least amount of time running through administration tasks by providing the necessary support to assign the licenses in the most optimized way, ensuring that the license entitlement is used to the fullest extent. The calculation takes into account both physical and virtual resources along with datacenter and cluster configuration to ensure that all license requirements are catered to with the licenses in place. HARDWARE CHANGE IMPACT ON DATACENTER LICENSING Automatically identifies licenses that are not assigned to any consumer Alerts highlight any assigned license that is not being utilized This feature ensures that any changes that are made to hardware resources within the datacenter are immediately visible to the organization. As a result the SAM Manager is able to immediately determine the current compliance position along with highlighting any changes should there be any under- or over license position due to the change. The organization is able to mitigate risks in such complex and fast-changing server environment and is helped to identify any potential non-utilized entitlements that can subsequently be reassigned to alternative resources.

7 APPLICATION FAMILY OVERVIEW PAGES Overview of deployment and compliance for the whole product family Total investment, compliance risk and overspend for the whole product family This feature enables the organization to see all instances of a software product (such as Windows Server) in one screen. All deployment information for each and every version AND edition is clearly displayed enabling decisions to be made on how a business can license their products in the most optimized way. It also displays the compliance position for each and every version and edition as well as giving an overall cost for the product along with the overall compliance (together with risk or underspend figure), and finally delivers information on whether there are unused licenses with a potential optimization cost.

8 TRANSPARENCY OF SOFTWARE CONSUMPTION Computer detail page provide full insight into software consumption The actual license requirement of each software instance is displayed Determines whether the software instance is covered by license entitlements It is widely acknowledged that the vendor audit is a very costly exercise to the enterprise given the sheer volume of information that is required, the time taken alone is hugely significant given the facts that are required such as platform and vendor independent reports, vendor specific reports, usage and entitlement mapping. Snow License Manager 8 builds upon the existing platform to deliver FULL transparency into the software consumption, regardless of operating platform, delivering full insight into the license requirements and entitlements coverage of EVERY SINGLE software instance WHAT LICENSE COVERS WHICH SOFTWARE AND HOW IN THE DATACENTER This feature delivers a brand new view on each and every application that delivers full details on how compliance was derived, saving time automatically for the organization during audit. The feature quickly and easily enables it to see exactly where the high cost products are running in the datacenter, enabling further optimization to reduce cost and risk.

9 ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE VENDORS Enterprise software from vendors such as Oracle and IBM often represent the largest spend and therefore automatically the largest risk to the enterprise. These vendors tend to not make it easy for organizations to understand, or be able to determine, usage of their software. As an example, organizations running IBM software must run specific tools from IBM in order to be sub-capacity eligible. Snow License Manager 8 integrates with all the IBM tools (ILMT version 7 and version 9, Tivoli Asset Discovery for Distributed (TADd) and IBM BigFix Inventory) to enable organizations to manage and optimize their PVU licensed products. SIMPLIFIED MANAGEMENT OF PVU FULL- AND SUB-CAPACITY LICENSING Compliance for IBM PVU based on data from IBM measurement tools Through the powerful entitlement import, using IBM SKU numbers, organizations can see their compliance position for each product quickly and easily. Any potential risk of full capacity licensing on virtual machines that are not being measured are automatically highlighted, resulting in the customer having full insight into IBM PVU software consumption across their estate enabling the mitigation of risk associated with IBM PVU software.

10 SIMPLIFIED ENTITLEMENT MANAGEMENT Insight into links between licenses (D-part) and maintenance (E-part) and current entitlements IBM entitlement management based on SKU Importing and managing IBM entitlements (straight from vendor purchase records) is vastly simplified through Snow s SKU intelligence. It automatically determines what has been purchased, reduces the time spent and mitigates risk of manual entry error. Through using the vendor purchase records, organizations will also find that not only are they simplifying entitlement management, they are also improving accuracy of reporting information which in turn may lead to gap identification, such as ensuring that upgrades are correctly tracked alongside existing base licenses. ORACLE IN THE DATACENTER VIEW As one of the key high value software product vendors, Oracle represents a significant cost to any business that makes use of their technology and this feature is set to enable the organization to gain full insight into their use of Oracle database technology per datacenter/cluster across the enterprise. The new view enables the organization to visualize any potential risks that may exist within clustered environments with regards to their Oracle database usage. It also allows the organization to assess whether the Oracle database deployment is significant enough to justify the investment in Oracle licenses for the whole datacenter/cluster capacity.

11 FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT For an organization to be truly in control of their software assets, they need to have full control of their current software spend, including maintenance and support costs. Contractual cost management and reporting for maintenance and support Through the brand new maintenance and support view, the full (and line item separated) cost of support and maintenance for each period is easily tracked and reported upon, giving the customer the ability to report on the above both for the right now, historical spend as well as future maintenance to enable the total cost of the software assets to be calculated at any moment in time.

12 REPORTING AND ALERTS ON UNUSED OR OVER-ASSIGNED LICENSES Showing the potential optimization if unused software were to be reharvested This feature delivers a new view that identifies on an application-by-application basis, whether an application is over- or underlicensed, together with information on usage. Together this enables the organization to fully understand their compliance position and determine if there are installations available for re-harvesting that would enable cost avoidance to the organization. Notifications are immediately visible as and when things change in the organization that potentially releases licenses, again to enable re-harvesting to occur.

13 TRENDING AND FORECASTING Deployment trend to identify state of the product Dynamic date range selector for trending Once a business has full control of their existing spend, it becomes a key requirement to begin to be able to forecast future spend in order to understand how their budgets need to be planned. Snow License Manager 8 enables the organization to determine forecasted costs based on existing trends and usage patterns.

14 TRENDING AND FORECASTING OF FUTURE COSTS Historical compliance trends visualized to support decisions This feature takes existing license, maintenance and support costs along with usage information and enables customers to project costs that are appropriate for renewal time of the existing licenses. It also looks at existing growth trends within the datacenter and customers can use this information to forecast how many licenses will be required come the license renewal, giving them advanced insight into what they will need to be negotiating against. Overall this feature brings a time saving to the customer during the process of planning and budgeting for their existing software investments.

15 USER EXPERIENCE In order to help simplify Software Asset Management, Snow License Manager 8 has been revamped from the way in which it delivers against the core needs for the user. Time has been spent understanding how users interact with the solution in order to simplify things were at all possible, making things easier to access with less clicks or menu selections, without losing the full potential of the solution. USER EXPERIENCE ENHANCED New user interface focusing on content and ease of use Snow License Manager enables all the different stakeholders within the organization to have access to the data relevant to their role. Providing access to different features and data can be tailored based on needs.

16 Filtering capabilities enables vendor specific widgets Drill down into reports from all widgets To help users personalize their own Snow License Manager experience, new customizable Snowboards have been introduced including interactive widgets, drill-down and filtering support to enable easy access to the data that underpins the information reported to the user through their Snowboards. There are now no less than 13 individual languages that are supported across the user interface, including: English UK, English US, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese.

17 KNOWN LIMITATIONS Microsoft Internet Explorer - the visual appearance in different Microsoft Internet Explorer versions might be affected due to layout discrepancies. Application Family in the summary section, when applications have no license requirement after adjustments (where no license is required or included in bundle) then the visual appearance of compliance percentage will show as 0% (rather than the expected 100%). However, the compliance for each individual application is correct and displays correctly on the application detail page as well as in the compliance summary reports. Application Details in the specific situation where having a surplus of licenses that are transferred via upgrade rights to an application with a higher version, and the application has no consumers (no installations or users) and the license has assignment type organization with upgrade rights and auto allocation on, then the transfer toggle in the application details will not show the surplus transfer. However in compliance calculations the transfer of licenses surplus will be shown correctly. Report Applications per computers and Applications per users may have long response times depending on the large amount of data that it retrieves. Snow recommends always adding filtering criteria to the report prior to retrieving it to reduce the amount of data included. Report License Compliance Summary : The sum of costs and compliance values are available in the web interface, but currently are not available when exported to Excel. The Datacenter detail page presents the details of inventoried and non-inventoried Virtual machines in the list under Virtual Machines tab but the information box on the top only presents the total number of Virtual Machines. The report All Licenses when exported will miss the content for the non-default column reason for invalid assignments if this has been selected for export. DEPENDENCIES TO OTHER PRODUCTS To be able to populate Snow License Manager 8 with IBM PVU consumption data the following software needs to be installed: Snow Integration Manager 4.7 (includes connectors for IBM ILMT and IBM BigFix Inventory) Snow Inventory Data Processor (processes data from the IBM connectors).