Novell Gives Mainframe Shops Cross-Platform Linux Licenses

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

If there is anything that has been true in the past four decades of computing, it is that if you pay for a high-end, high-cost mainframe platform, you need a lot of hand-holding that is not easy to quantify but which nonetheless has great economic value. In the heyday on mainframes back in the 1960s and 1970s, customers who bought what were then outrageously expensive mainframes even got custom programming and on-site service support from the major mainframe suppliers, and IBM was well known for using its vast army of programmers and engineers to get account control through attention.

So it comes as no surprise, then, that it is the mainframe shop and not the X86 shop that is getting a new Strategic Enterprise Agreement for Linux (SEAL) that Novell has cooked up to make mainframe customers happy.

The basic problem is this: mainframe shops, who pay big bucks for their commercial Linux licenses, want more flexibility when it comes to deploying Linux on the various mainframe, Power, and X86 platforms they have in their data centers. They want something that looks and feels more like a site license, and they don't want to have to keep track of every kind of box that is running Linux within their data center. In short, they want a custom Linux license that does not necessarily tie Linux to a specific architecture or box.

Novell has a bit of experience with this, explains Gerard McDonnell, director of Novell's alliance with IBM, and has long since established what is called a Strategic Enterprise Agreement (SEA) to simplify both sales and license management of Novell's operating system, middleware, systems management, and other products. Under a SEA license, you pay Novell once and you could deploy NetWare, GroupWise, and other programs on any server you wanted. This kind of enterprise licensing is not cheap, but it is easy and it usually does have a volume discount, too. Commitment has some discount value to it, as does volume. The SEA license applied to any hardware platform that supported Novell's software, and it was in no way restricted to a certain set of customers.

SEAL is a bit different, but has a similar philosophy nonetheless. According to McDonnell, Novell is rolling out the new SEAL licensing, which is a variant of the SEA licensing but specifically limited to the licensing of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 on IBM eServer platforms. To be specific, the SEAL licensing only applies to X86 and X64 xSeries rack and tower servers and their related BladeCenter HS20 and HS40 blade servers, which use Intel's Pentium and Xeon processors; the eServer 325 and the LS20 BladeCenter blade servers, which use Advanced Micro Devices's Opteron processors; the iSeries and pSeries servers, which are based on IBM's own Power4 and Power5 processors and which support Linux inside logical partitions; and the zSeries mainframes, which also support Linux on the VM-based Integrated Linux Facility (IFL) partitions. The only way to get the special SEAL licensing, which allows Linux licenses to move around those eServer platforms, is to have a set number of IBM mainframe engines running Linux in the mix.

Novell is creating the SEAL license to preserve its lead among IBM mainframe shops and to extend that lead. "It's no big secret that we don't have the biggest share in Linux," says McDonnell, "but we do have the largest share on mainframes." The deal is also designed to get Novell in on the front end of the sales cycle and not at the back end. McDonnell says that companies tend to decide to go to Linux and then only make a decision about architectures and platforms at the tail end of the deal. At this point, it is very tough to compare and contrast the mainframe to other eServer platforms. However, with the SEAL license, the idea is to get mainframe shops to decide on Linux and, because they know they can run Linux on any eServer platform, know they have the flexibility to move their Linuxes around across X64, Power, and mainframe platforms as conditions dictate in the future. They can change their mind.

While the SEAL license makes Linux licenses more portable, the initial offering, which was developed in Europe specifically because big mainframe shops in Germany were asking for a better licensing option, still has some restrictions. Under the initial SEAL offering, which was tested in Germany, companies could buy Linux licenses in blocks of 125. Each license could be used on a "SEAL workload," which Novell defined as a single mainframe engine, a two-way piece of a Power-based server, or a two-way slice of an X86/X64 server. Under this original SEAL license, which has now been expanded across Europe, companies had to acquire at least 25 SEAL workloads for mainframe engines, leaving a remaining 100 SEAL workloads that could be spread across Power or X86/X64 servers. On a zSeries 990 mainframe, a three-year SLES 9 license costs 32,500 euros per engine, but the SEAL license costs only 1,422 euros per workload. So the 125-workload pack costs 177,750 euros, which means the breakeven cost is somewhere between 5 and 6 mainframe engines. But for that same money, customers now have up to 25 mainframe engines and up to 200 Power or X86 engines (with a maximum of two engines per workload and 100 workloads). This is a very good deal for mainframe shops, to say the least.

Not everyone needs that many Linux licenses, and that is why, says McDonnell, Novell has introduced what it calls "baby SEAL" licenses, which have a slightly higher price per SEAL workload, but which allow customers to buy licenses in smaller blocks. The three baby SEAL licenses come with a total of 25, 50, or 75 workloads, and 2, 3, or 4 (respectively) of these workloads as a minimum must be deployed on mainframes. Each workload costs 1,900 euros.

McDonnell said that reaction to the new licensing has been very positive in Europe thus far. "The substantial cost savings provokes the discussion about licensing, but the simplicity of the deal is what customers ultimately like." He is underplaying just how good of a deal SEAL licensing is in terms of economics. Basically, if you make a commitment to run a certain number of mainframe engines on Linux, you can run a much larger number of Power or X86/X64 platforms for free. Even if customers don't use the maximum number of non-mainframe licenses, it is a very steep discount.

Right now, Novell is only offering this licensing in Europe, but McDonnell says that Novell has every intention of moving it to the United States and then possibly throughout the rest of the world. Novell is even looking into how it can add Novell Linux Desktop, the company's PC and workstation variant of Linux, to the SEAL license. For example, every server workload license could be translated into a few hundred desktop licenses (that is my number, not Novell's). This would offer a true site license for customers who wanted to deploy Linux from the desktop to the data center--and one where they would not have to manage licenses so aggressively. Novell could offer similar licensing for other vendors, too. For example, across Hewlett-Packard's Xeon- and Opteron-based ProLiant and Itanium-based Integrity server lines. But nothing has been done here yet.

Of course, if Novell wanted to truly simplify Linux licensing, it would offer site licenses based on revenue or employee count--the latter being the way Sun Microsystems is selling its Java Enterprise System middleware stack. McDonnell conceded that Sun's pricing on JES was interesting, but he did not give any indication that Novell would go that far. However, he did say that in the past, Novell did offer such master license agreements, based on a per seat count, that allowed a company to use any and all of Novell's software throughout the company based on the number of seats it was running on. This would be the ultimate in flexibility for Linux licensing. Maybe Novell will go for it, and then again, maybe it will just see how SEAL goes first.