VSA perpetual licensing no longer

[M_C]

Anyone else noticed that all the VSA licenses are now "term" based?

I fell foul of this the other week and brought a 50TB license for a new customer. I noticed in the UI that there was an expiry date which I hadn't noticed before.

I emailed HP Licensing and they initially said they were still perpetual and not subscription based. They then changed their minds.

If it was a brand new product then it maybe less confusing but as all previous versions have just had a support expiry I only checked the item part number and basic description.

I wonder how many other people are going to get a shock in 3-5 years when the license expires and you can no longer manage your storage....

[oikjn]

I believe this switched when they added the different capacity licenses.  It usued to be 10TB perpetual and then went to 3TB/10TB/50TB term.  I don't think you could ever get the 50TB perpetual.

IMO its a terrible revenue generation idea by some MBA and will ultimately hurt the product more than it will help them.

[HPstorageTom]

Correct, the perpetual license schema was introduced with the new capacity licenses. The 50TB VSA license was always perpetual.

[M_C]

This is the issue, the licenses are NOT perpetual, they are term (Subscription) based. As far as I can see all of them including the 10TB are all term based, not perpetual option.

Just because of a capacity or version change the licensing has been turned on its head. And if you are just looking at the SKU it is not very clear. This is why HP licensing team dont even know how it now works.

If they dont understand it then what chance have we got?

Its a shame as I always used to promote the LeftHand/P4000/Storevirtual VSA's but with a licensing model change which could now result with you being unable to manage your storage we will have to look else where.

Fair enough if it was a new product but to completely ditch the perpetual option which has been available for years and not make it very obvious in the SKU I think is a very poor show from HP.

[M_C]

does anyone know what actually happens at the end of the "term"?

Ive been told that we will lose management capabilities and I assume we would be unable to configure or edit anything. Maybe we  lose advanced features such as Auto-Tiering and Network-Raid?

Reading quickspecs though it may just be that we lose support and access to software updates, which would be fair enough

[Bart_Heungens]

Hi,

Term license enforcement from 12.0 on:

No new volumes

No new user initiated snapshots

No new remote copies

No upgrades

Data access is not blocked so read-write access continues...

Kr,

Bart

[CalvinZito]

I know the product team is looking at the licensing model - I'll point them to your feedback here.  It's not the first time we've heard that folks like the perpetual license. 

[Tom Lyczko]

We may probably not renew if this trend continues when our support term expires.

We have two 10 TB licenses purchased last year, if we add a 3rd server next year with VSA, it would be impractical to buy this software ever again since we would have two different license plans to think about.

This change may be probably to force SAN sales since this product imay no longer doing so well in the market since most enterprise companies that could deploy VSA have enough money to go with VSAN which is probably a better choice at the enterprise level.

SMBs however must compare costs of VSA vs. VSAN and what one gets for the $$$.

[HPstorageTom]

Sorry, I was typing to fast ... it is not a pertual license scheme anymore it is a term based license scheme that was introduced together with the additional capacity licenses.

[M_C]

Hopefully HP will see sense and bring back perpeutal with the normal support offerings. Or at least make it clear inthe SKU description.

When I logged the ticket initally with the HP Licensing team, they even got it wrong.

I still feel that in about 3 years time a lot of people are going to get a shock

[danevald]

Hi Bart,

Do you know if a backup solution like Veeam, that leverages the storage snapshot functionality is a user-initiated snapshot?

Otherwise a workaround could be to switch to not use that functionality in Veeam - until a new license is installed.

Br,

Dan