By John Smith
Organizations that utilize concurrently licensed software—the license model typically used for engineering and technical applications, sometimes have many license servers to meet the needs of the user community. Frequently, this license server infrastructure can be consolidated which brings a number of benefits to the organization.
1) Lower Risk
It seems counter-intuitive but the most significant result of consolidation is to lower the risk of a license server outage. First thoughts would be that fewer servers would mean a higher risk, but if we examine the characteristics of highly consolidated license servers they are as follows:
- Highly connected
- Located in corporate data centers
- Installed on robust hardware and recent versions of the software
- Supported by knowledgeable, well-trained staff
- Underpinned with a backup strategy and change control discipline
Another reason for lower risk is that the simpler the architecture, the less statistical risk of power outage, network outage, power failure of hardware malfunctions. True, with fewer servers the result of a failure will be more widespread, but statistics tell us that the enterprises that implement a high degree of consolidation also benefit from extremely high reliability.
2) Higher Support Quality
During the consolidation process, the location of these crucial license servers will have been carefully chosen with a number of factors considered. One of these would be to ensure that key support staff are available to manage the resource. And with those staff usually comes adherence to standards, adoption of best practices and 24 x 7 coverage.
3) Optimized Performance
If we examine all the factors that lead to lower risk we see that most also contribute to superior performance (high bandwidth, robust hardware, up-to-date software).
4) Lower Operational Cost
With fewer instances to support, several costs will naturally be reduced:
Hardware (fewer instances)
Support (fewer, more standardized servers)
Infrastructure (power, environment control)
5) Better Software Utilization and Lower Cost
The final result may not be immediately obvious but is well supported by those best in class organizations that serve licenses from a small number of license servers. When we see how this works we find that several factors are in play here:
For infrequently used software only one or two copies need to be available corporate-wide to support, for instance, legacy products or obsolete processes.
For moderately used software we see that software inventory is right-sized with server consolidation and each license will (on average) be used more frequently. This increases the license utilization for these applications.
For highly used software (usually also the most expensive), dramatic economies of scale result from eliminating silos. Because there are very few license deployments to manage, usage statistics are usually gathered and analyzed; the result is that efficiency of software usage, measured in turns per day or engineers per license, always shows improvement in the consolidated server environment. This can result in lower on-going software costs for these often mission critical applications.
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To learn more about concurrent license optimization and the benefits of tracking usage of these licenses, please view our on-demand webinar: Pure Gold: Leveraging Software Usage Data to Reduce License Costs and Risk