All good explanations Pete! I wonder if IBM is working on some type of
mechanism that would help users with license compliance given all these
scenarios... or even scenarios like running Domino servers under i5/OS and
counting those users. Would probably take a release or two of all products
involved to get the necessary 'hooks' written in.
Pete Helgren
<Pete@xxxxxxxxxx>
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11/05/2007 06:12
PM Subject
Re: User based pricing
Please respond to
Midrange Systems
Technical
Discussion
<midrange-l@midra
nge.com>
First, a user is any person that authenticates to your system. That is,
a userid and password is used to uniquely identify that person to the
system. It does not matter if the person has a user profile on your
System i, if it takes a userid and password to gain access to a program,
then that person is a user.
The following would all add to the user count:
A 5250 interactive program is run when a user logs onto your system.
That person is a user.
You have a web application running that may use a single user id and
password to make a DB connection to DB2/400 AND that database connection
passes a user ID and password to a program that uniquely identifies the
user. That person is a user and EVERY person that authenticates through
that same mechanism would ADD to the user count. For example, you may
have a single user profile that authenticates to DB2/400 and then 20
users access your web program using that same DB connection. Then you
have 20 users authenticated and need 20 user entitlements
You have a PHP application running in PASE but still have a connection
to DB2/400 and then a single authenticated DB connection carries 20
users. Then you have 20 users on the system and need 20 user entitlements.
You have 10 "generic" user profiles that multiple people use to access
the system. Since they do not uniquely identify the user, you only need
10 user entitlements.
Remember also that it is *concurrent* counts that you need to make. So
if you have 10 "generic" user ids and only 5 of them are in use at any
one time, then you only need 5 user entitlements.
Another thing to remember is that external users are counted *just* like
internal users. However, you can purchase unlimited external user
entitlement "package" that allows all external users to be entitled to
access the system as authenticated users with one caveat: Those external
users cannot be "employees" of your company. Uniquely identified
employees must be counted as part of your regular user count even if
they access the system externally.
What wouldn't be a user? An application that doesn't require a user ID
and password to access the system. Browsing a web site would be an
example of this. Also, if none of the authentication takes place in
i5/OS, then it doesn't count as a user. For example a PHP application
running in PASE and using MySQL in PASE would NOT require a user
entitlement no matter how many users access the system.
I think the key phrase is "uniquely identified user". Regardless of how
it is done, a user that can have a unique identity in your application
will require a user entitlement, if your application run in or
authenticates in i5/OS. In addition, that same user can be signed on to
multiple devices/sessions and will still count as 1 user.
If you plan for lots of external access by non-employees, then get the
unlimited external user package.
Also, the IBM supplied user profiles do not count as well.
Pete Helgren
Jon S wrote:
I have a customer who is looking at buying a new i515 and we are fuzzy on
what the definition of a user is. I can't find any info on IBM's website
and
I want the make sure the salesman is telling us correctly, that a user
profile can sign on to multiple session and it still only counts as one.
Any clarification would be greatly appreciated.
Jon
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