Capacity Licensing Example

Licensing is often considered as a means to restrict the number of users who can use a software product. It is also used for restricting usage of hardware devices including those that are controlled by software.

Let us look at the example of a mobile phone network to understand how capacity licensing can be used to control the number of operations performed by a machine.

1.Due to limited availability of frequencies, cell phones share common frequencies. Cell phone service providers split their service areas into cells, which allows phones in different cells to use the same frequencies simultaneously.

2.Each service area contains an antenna station that services many cells in that area. When a caller moves out of the range of an antenna, that antenna station transfers the caller to another antenna station in a different area. Therefore, the number of cells used by an antenna station is dynamic and changes constantly.

Let us consider a company named ZoneCast, which sells equipment used by antenna stations. Assuming that their product is called Cell Manager. They need to restrict the number of antenna stations that can use Cell Manager (the hard limit). They also want to restrict the number of cells that can be serviced by Cell Manager (the capacity) for a single antenna station.

Although, each Cell Manager may have the ability to service 10,000 cells, not every antenna station needs to service that many cells. Therefore, ZoneCast uses Sentinel RMS to create licenses that enable ZoneCast to:

1.Charge by number of antenna stations that use Cell Managers (the hard limit), and;

2.Charge by number of cells (capacity) the Cell Managers used by a single antenna station can service. (You can also share the capacity among multiple antenna stations by using pooled capacities—see the next section for details.)

ZoneCast can use capacity licensing to charge different amounts for the same Cell Manager by restricting the number of cells that the equipment can service.

Capacity licensing benefits customers who purchase higher cell coverage. This can be done by by going for an upgrade license rather than buying and installing an additional instance of the Cell Manager.

Since the antenna stations are networked, Cell Manager licensing is managed by the Sentinel RMS License Manager centrally, which also makes license maintenance and upgrade easy.

Attributes of Capacity License

Let us now look at some of the attributes of capacity license.

>A capacity license is a normal license and not a trial license.

>A capacity license is a network license and not a standalone or repository license.

>A capacity license is not a held license.

>A capacity license is not a redundant license.

>A capacity license is not a commuter license.

>The license code format for capacity license is 'Encrypted' only.

>A capacity license is not a grace license.

>Local locking should not be enabled in case of capacity license.