Product licenses

Multiple product licenses are available for IBM Spectrum Control. Each license determines the features that you can access from the IBM Spectrum Control GUI, command prompt, command-line interface, and the API.

Important licensing update: The calculation for determining license compliance in IBM Spectrum Control was updated to better meet your needs. For detailed information about the new licensing calculation and how it impacts you, check out the documentation for a more recent release of IBM Spectrum Control at https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/spectrum-control/5.4.2?topic=licenses-licensing.
Compare the features of these four offerings:
Table 1. Features of the IBM Spectrum Control licenses
Feature IBM Spectrum Control Standard Edition and IBM Spectrum Control Standard Select Edition IBM Spectrum Control Advanced Edition and IBM Spectrum Control Advanced Select Edition
Understanding the environment
Support for a single dashboard view of the environment to manage storage systems, hypervisors, servers, and Fibre Channel fabrics. Check mark Check mark
Capacity monitoring of storage systems, pools, volumes, file systems, and file sets. Check mark Check mark
Performance monitoring of storage systems, Fibre Channel networks, applications, and departments. Check mark Check mark
Defining groups of resources that represent applications or departments. Check mark Check mark
Defining tiers of storage for planning and reporting. Check mark Check mark
Health and alerting
Show health status of hypervisors, networks, servers, and storage systems, and selected internal entities. Check mark Check mark
Alerting on status changes and thresholds of capacity, performance and error metrics. Check mark Check mark
Reporting
Web GUI reports: Reports that you can create from the information in the user-interface tables. You can configure, schedule, and save this information to your file systems. Or you can specify to send it to another user or person by mail. Check mark Check mark
Web GUI reports: Capacity and inventory reports. Check mark Check mark
Web GUI reports: Chargeback reports for showing the capacity and the cost of the storage that is used by applications, departments, hypervisors, and physical servers.   Check mark
Web GUI reports: Consumer reports for showing the capacity and the cost of the block storage that is used by an application, department, hypervisor, and physical server.   Check mark
Web GUI reports: Roll up reports in which capacity data is combined from multiple instances of IBM Spectrum Control for reporting purposes.   Check mark
External reports: Reports that use REST API and Cognos®. Check mark Check mark
Transforming
For storage systems that run IBM Spectrum Virtualize, the transform storage feature moves volumes, and configures compression and the properties of the volumes.   Check mark
Analyzing
Analytics-driven tiering to automatically move volumes to the most cost-effective tier.   Check mark
Analysis of storage-pool balancing to generate recommendations to help you optimize storage resources.   Check mark
Storage reclamation that you can realize when the block storage systems in your data center are analyzed, and you determine and reclaim volumes that aren't used for storing data. You can replace the existing storage space instead of purchasing new storage media.   Check mark
Provisioning
File provisioning for IBM® Storwize® V7000 Unified. Check mark Check mark
Other
Inclusion of the license for IBM Copy Services Manager to manage 2-site replication, 3-site replication, and advanced copy services. Learn more about how to download and install Copy Services Manager at http://www.ibm.com/support/knowledgecenter/SSESK4. Check mark Check mark
Snapshot-based protection that is provided by IBM Spectrum Protect™ Snapshot for the applications and databases that IBM Spectrum Control uses.   Check mark

To view a complete list of devices that can be used with IBM Spectrum Control, go to http://www.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21386446.

IBM Storage Insights for IBM Spectrum Control: IBM Storage Insights for IBM Spectrum Control is an IBM Cloud service that can help you predict and prevent storage problems before they impact your business. It is complementary to IBM Spectrum Control and is available at no additional cost if you have an active license with a current subscription and support agreement for IBM Virtual Storage Center, IBM Spectrum Storage Suite, or any edition of IBM Spectrum Control.

For more information and to view a list of features in the service, see IBM Storage Insights for IBM Spectrum Control.