v17 - Move from "chip" to "core" licencing

[justin_willey]

According to the v17 docs here v17 is licensed on the basis of cores not chips as before. Can anyone explain how the transition for existing users on support contracts will work. Eg if they currently have a 2 chip license covering 2 x Xeon E5-2680 giving 24 cores.

Also is there any indication of pricing yet - www.sapstore.com is showing screenshots of v17 but is quoting prices per chip (USD 4050.00 for SA Workgroup) not per core.

While with the increasing prevalence of VMs (groan) I can see the logic in per-core pricing - I am concerned about the possible impact on multi-core servers of significant price structure changes.

Thanks

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Justin - from a licensing transition perspective, 1 SQL Anywhere chip license will map to 4 core licenses. The SAP Store still has the previous chip licensing showing but we're working with them to add the new core licensing info. Pricing per core will be approximately 1/4 of the chip price (give or take rounding). Note that you only license the cores you're going to use for the server. So in your example, although you have 2 CPUs with 24 cores, if your SQL Anywhere server will only use X of those cores, you would buy X core licenses. Your existing license would map to 2 chips x 4 cores = 8 cores and then you would buy additional core licenses if you require more. The other thing to keep in mind is that per-seat pricing is still available and hasn't changed. If you have a smaller number of users, that may be another option to consider.
Regards, Mike

[justin_willey · Accepted solution]

Thanks for the extra info Mike. I can see this working fine for some of our users (basically those on VMs), but I worry that we will see massive resistance to upgrading coming from someone facing a 300% cost increase (per seat would be an even larger increase). This won't necessarily cause problems immediately as v16 will be around for sometime yet but down the road ...

[justin_willey · Accepted solution]

Looking at another client - they have a 2 processor machine with 48 cores (and approx 900 users). So their choices are (assuming a 1 processor licence becomes a 4 core licence, and the published pricing) :

Per core licencing - 12 x 4 core licence = 12 x 4050 = $48,600 (compared with 2 x 4050 = 8090 - a 501% increase)

or on a per-seat basis: 900 x 195 = $175,500 (a 2069% increase)

This is going to be a hard sell.