Hewlett-Packard and Red Hat have agreed from next month to
simplify software licence management in blade servers, by charging
by the chassis rather than per server.
The development was confirmed by the two companies at the
Linuxworld conference and expo in San Francisco, where they
introduced an all-in-one software bundle designed for the Red Hat
Enterprise Linux and HP Bladesystem environment.
The planned licence will enable HP customers to deploy Red Hat
Linux on up to eight blade servers, though final details of the
pricing structure have not yet been released.
The new licensing model will make it easier for customers to add
and remove blade servers, mirroring the capability of Red Hat
Network products to enable quick provisioning of blade servers as
workloads change with business needs.
With the HP-Red Hat offering, repurposing and provisioning a
blade server can be done in minutes rather than hours.
The licensing model may mark the first evidence of an evolution
in pricing models away from per-processor licensing to take account
of technological developments such as multi-core processors and
virtualisation software. The new technology is making systems more
and more flexible in terms of the software they run.