Question about licensing

[linux-storage]

I need some clarification on the licensing. I can't find an answer to this in the software license.

I am testing Open-E on 4 of our storage servers:

16 x 1TB drives
RAID 6 total capacity 14TB
*** This is the one I'm on now. I have DSS with 16TB license.

16 x 1.5TB drives
RAID 6 total capacity 21TB

24 x 1TB drives
RAID 6 total capacity 22TB

24 x 1.5TB drives
RAID 6 total capacity 33TB


I will need to upgrade the license for the Open-E I have. Since it won't work with those servers with greater then 16TB of storage.

I plan to use the same Open-E product to test all 4 machines. This is the Open-E product we will keep for internal use.

Clearly I need to upgrade the license to the maximum capacity - in this case 33TB of storage.

My questions are as follows:

1) Is the license capacity the total size of the disks in the server or is it the total size of the RAID array(s) in the server?
For example, RS3000e = 16TB total size, but only 14TB RAID size

2) Is the license capacity in decimal or is it binary?
In my currently setup (CONFIGURATION --> volume manager) the Unit Manager lists the unit size of Unit S001 as 13038.52GB. This is 12.73TB and is clearly a "binary" GB, strictly speaking it is GiB (gibibyte) and not GB.

This is important because for the 33TB server, I'm not sure if I need to purchase:

License Key 16TB
License Key 32TB

If Open-E does it's licensing based on total raw storage in decimal (36TB on the RS5000z) then I will need the 32TB license.

If Open-E does it's licensing based on actual storage available to the Open-E operating system, then the total (for the RS5000z) will be:

33TB * 0.909494702 = 30.9TB (remember RAID 6 size will be 33TB and not 36TB)
(0.909494702 is the multiplier to convert decimal TB to binary TiB)

In that case the 16TB license gives me a total license of 32TB, and is just about enough.

So how does the licensing work?

[pfeifferl]

Yes, would be interesting ...

I have a DSS 16 TB with 16 HDD slots. If I use e.g. 8 x 1 TB RAID5 + 7 x 1.5 TB RAID5 (+ 1 Hotspare), I would have a total of 16 TB (brutto at RAID-Level) available. This should fit to 16 TB license, right?

Lukas