Licences - OSL Gesellschaft für offene Systemlösungen mbH

Licensing of the OSL Software

Being in a costant dialog with the users, OSL develops the software technology and solutions for the Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC), especially in the areas of storage virtualisation, clustering and convergent networks. We follows the strategy of creating platform-independent, Open Systems oriented solutions, which allows to reduce technological dependencies and should give the user the autonomy, decision freedom and long-term stability of the data center processes. In the intereset of the simplicity of use, of the new, unconventional solution approaches and of the lasting, portable software stack, our own ideas are developed and implemented from the driver to the user interface. All the costs required for the development and maintenance are covered exclusively by OSL thanks to the profits from licensing and services.

The target group for our both largest solutions OSL SC and OSL UVE are professional users, typically with the self-operated IT infrastructure. Our Licence and Maintenace model for the current software generation 4.8 is based on the following basic principles:

OSL-specific Terms of Use consequently aligned to the German Law.
Permanent Right of Use licensed at a fixed price, but granted for unlimited time.
For OSL Unified Virtualisation Environment (HCI) and OSL Storage Cluster (storage virtualisation, clustering, application management, high availability), the Right of Use incl. one year of Maintenance.
Follow-up contracts for Maintenance possible (cancellable annually).

The price for the Right of Use and Maintenance is based on the extent and the complexity of the software and of the execution environment. Usually for every server node in a cluster one server-binded Right of Use* - based on the licence units (LU). Please find more information in the tab "Licence Units".

The UVE (HCI - fully virtualised VM infrastructure) offers two types of licences within one cluster:

Unified Virtualisation Server (UVS) - depending on setup 1 - 2 pieces
Unified Virtualisation Client (UVC) - depending on setup 1 - 120 pieces

For every UVS and every UVC you purchase one unlimited licence with one year of Maintenance, respectively. As for the Right of Use, you can enlarge the cluster with further UVCs, without additional costs. However: The Maintenance must always cover all the nodes of one cluster. The UVC nodes that came later mean higher maintenance costs. Of course you can use the cluster further after expiration of this maintenance, but then you have no access to the future fixes and updates.

The figure below demonstrates the licensing model in one cluster consisting from two UVS and three UVC nodes.

UVE Licence

The OSL Storage Cluster is suitable for classic data center infrastructures, especially in combination with OSL RSIO, but also for more modern approaches without external RAID systems and fibre-channel SAN.
The necessary functional modules can be combined for every cluster node according to the needs, with the Base module being always required:

Base - Basic storage virtualisation, multipath, cluster engine
ACO - Application Control Option: Application and Resource Management and HA
XDM - Extended Data Management: Data Mirroring, Data Mobility ...

Please find further details on the respective software information pages.

You are purchasing the Right of Use together with one year of Maintenance, however for every node and every software module in the cluster a Maintenance with a unified SLA should be signed.

SC-Lizenz

Software of the OSL Gesellschaft für offene Systemlösungen mbH and the related documentation are subject of copyright and intellectual property of OSL, and, as the case may be, of the respective copyright holders or suppliers. The usage of the OSL Software is, beside any additional agreements, subject to our End User Licence - Allgemeinen Nutzungsbestimmungen, that can be viewed here (in German).

Despite all our efforts to keep things simple and robust: the constant increase in complexity of today's IT solutions is a fact. Therefore the choice and the assessment of the suitability of the software and of the software/hardware combination in the whole system remain the responsibility of the user. Therefore the whole system should be tested before starting to use it in production, to verify whether it is suitable for the intended use case. For such testing purposes OSL can grant a limited Right of Use for the period of max. three months. This kind of test usage can only be granted if you accept our Terms of Use, and it can not lead to any warranty or liability on our side. The evaluation licence alone does not give any right to the documentation, support, updates or receiving of further Rights of Use.

For further details please check our Terms of Use.
To receive an evaluation licence please contact one of our authorized partners or OSL directly.

The price for the Right of Use and the Maintenance depends on the scope and the complexity of the software and on the execution environment.

For every OS instance participating in the cluster, where the OSL Software is installed (usually a physical server), the number of the required licence units must be calculated and the Right of Use and, if desired, the Maintenance, must be purchased. For the calculation of the required licence units (LU), the determining factors are the number of the available threads, processor cores and CPU sockets per OS instance. Most of the x86 CPUs have one thread per core or two threads per core (like widespread CPUs with "hyperthreading"). So: in case of x86 with hyperthreading Cores x 2 = Threads. For SPARC the options vary more. To determine the number of required licence units, the licence calculator below may be used.

Licence Units Calculator