A new licensing charge IBM Corp introduced last week for its Parallel Sysplex (PS) cat’s cradle of mainframe clustering technologies is set to cost users who do not comply with new criteria between $250,000 and $1m. Under Big Blue’s tighter licensing model, PS users which do not have at least one application or system function running – ‘actively-coupled – across all capable PS images and supporting at least 50% of each image workload will no longer qualify for savings under the PS licensing charge program. Meta Group estimates users have a grace period of between six and nine months from now to effect any changes or they could lose up to $1m in license savings. Meta believes the difficulty and cost of PS application negotiations with ISVs, ongoing Y2K efforts and the complexity of migrating applications to PS will actually impede full Sysplex adoptions.
