| Once you have Instant Capacity processors in your system, another solution allows you to access this additional capacity. With Temporary Instant Capacity you can turn these CPUs on for short periods of time to respond to unexpected spikes in load. note Each system purchased with Instant Capacity will automatically be provided with a license for 5 days of Temporary Instant Capacity. This is intended to provide the ability to instantly activate a processor while going through the acquisition process for a permanent license. You can also add standard Temporary Capacity licenses to this initial bank if you want.
CPU Temporary Instant Capacity Use Model Temporary Instant Capacity (TiCAP) is really just an alternative method for activating Instant Capacity processors that are already in your system. The process for accessing these looks like this: Ensure there are enough physical CPUs in each nPar to accommodate the maximum load that is expected for the workloads running there. When you are acquiring the system, purchase some number of them as inactive Instant Capacity processors. You should ensure that you have permanently active CPUs that are sufficient to cover the load for the majority of each day or month. The rest can be Instant Capacity CPUs. Purchase a Temporary Instant Capacity license. This license entitles you to activate the Instant Capacity CPUs for 30 CPU days, which is equivalent to 720 CPU hours, or 43,200 CPU minutes. Pull the Temporary Instant Capacity license codeword from the HP Utility Pricing portal and apply it to your system. This sets up a bank of CPU minutes on the system. You can now activate and deactivate the Instant Capacity CPUs any time you wish. The Temporary Instant Capacity license works much like a bank debit card or a prepaid phone card. When you activate a CPU, it starts deducting minutes from your bank. When you deactivate the CPU, it stops deducting. You can activate multiple CPUs with a single Temporary Instant Capacity license, but it will deduct time from your bank for each CPU that you have activated. When your balance drops below a configurable threshold, which defaults to five CPU days, The TiCAP software sends an e-mail to the system contact to warn them that they may want to consider either permanently activating one or more CPUs or purchasing an additional Temporary Instant Capacity license. If the balance goes to zero, you will no longer be able to activate processors. However, the currently active processors will remain active until you reboot a partition. If you have a negative balance in your Temporary Instant Capacity account on the system, the software will notify you that you are out of compliance. If you choose to do a permanent activation of a CPU, the negative TiCAP balance is wiped out. If you purchase another Temporary Instant Capacity license, the negative balance is deducted from the amount of minutes you add when you apply the codeword to the system.
Some of the key benefits of this approach include: A single Temporary Instant Capacity license gives you the ability to activate any number of CPUs. If you have an nPar with 30 inactive processors, you can activate all 30 of them. This will deduct time from your bank for each CPU, but this is a very nice level of flexibility. For the cost of one TiCAP license, you can activate 30 CPUs to respond to an unexpected demand. The system has the same amount of capacity you would have purchased to cover peak load and some amount of room for growth. The system costs less because you only need to pay for roughly 25% of the cost of the Instant Capacity CPUs. You can maintain much higher utilization of your active capacity because you know you have spare capacity that can be instantly activated in the event of an infrequent or unexpected spike in load. This provides a very simple capacity-planning metric to use when additional permanent capacity should be activated. If you find you are frequently activating your TiCAP CPUs and needing to renew your 30-day licenses regularly, you might want to consider adding more permanent capacity. We describe a formula in the next chapter that will help you decide if you should get more Temporary Instant Capacity or permanently activate a CPU.
Temporary Instant Capacity Requirements There are only a few requirements for Temporary Instant Capacity that are above and beyond the standard CPU Instant Capacity requirements. You still have to satisfy all the requirements for standard Instant Capacity, including the purchasing of a right-to-access license for the Instant Capacity CPUs. The additional requirements include: Older versions of Instant Capacity required you to set up each partition on the system to send a daily e-mail to HP. Although this requirement has been removed starting with the version 7 release, you can still use it if you want to be able to use the portal to get usage information across all of your Instant Capacity systems. The e-mail is encrypted and sent once each day, every time there is startup or shutdown of a partition, and every time there is an activation or deactivation of a component. This also allows you to get usage and remaining capacity information from the Utility Pricing portal. There is no need for the system to be able to accept incoming e-mail, but it must be able to send outgoing e-mail. You need to purchase a Temporary Instant Capacity license. You can actually purchase as many of these as you think you will need depending on your consumption requirements and how much lead time you need to process purchases. You can choose to consume the initial 5 days of Temporary Capacity that is provided with your Instant Capacity licenses, but keep in mind that this will reduce your ability to activate processors while waiting for a permanent license. When your Temporary Instant Capacity balance drops to zero, you must either deactivate all Instant Capacity processors or purchase another TiCAP license. The system will not automatically deactivate processors on line, but they will be deactivated upon the next reboot. If a negative balance builds, it will be deducted from the next license added to the system. Alternatively, if you purchase one or more of the Instant Capacity processors for permanent activation, any negative balance will be erased.
If you have a system with Instant Capacity processors in it, you would be well served to investigate purchasing a Temporary Instant Capacity license. You will gain a tremendous amount of flexibility for a remarkably low cost. |
