IBM Announces Improved Usability in POWER COD Enablement

October 4th, 2017

Ron Gordon
Director – Power Systems

IBM recently announced a change in the acquisition and enablement of COD cores and memory. This change will significantly improve your usability and enablement of COD cores and memory for Power Systems.

Historically, the Elastic Capacity on Demand (eCOD) worked fine. But, it required advanced planning of an acquisition of eCOD enablement feature codes and usage monitoring, as well as needing to be purchased by placing an order with the sales team. Then, it could take a few days to get the codes to enable the eCOD days, delaying what could be a critical resource need. Now, that has changed. Customers with “dark cores and memory” will find the new process more timely, more usable, and more economic.

The new approach to eCOD is via the IBM Marketplace, where the eCOD memory and core vet codes are purchased, via credit card. Prices for AIX and Linux core days are $11 for the 870 and 880, and $3 for the 850. IBM i core days, for the 870 and 880, are $82. Memory is $1 for 8 GB, per day. Once the number of core days and memory are purchased, you will get the vet codes emailed to you, within 5 minutes. Once entered into the HMC, these codes can be used to activate cores or memory, on any machine within the enterprise, at any time. (This is very different from previous process where the eCOD days were associated with a specific system serial number and could only be activated on the system with that specific serial number.) Because of the rapid response of the vet codes, customers can now purchase a much smaller number of eCOD days, to have on hand for a spike in requirements. Once applied, within 5 minutes, customers may acquire and apply more, as needed. This is kind of like “just in time” eCOD. Since this is using the IBM Marketplace, there is no need to worry about after hours, weekends, or holiday delays when purchasing eCOD days.

What about accounting of usage and billing? Since the eCOD days were all purchased on-line, there is no billing. Once applied to a system, the system monitors the usage. Once the days are used, a warning message is sent to the administrator. The cores and memory do not “de-activate.” They continue active, and the system keeps track of your overage usage until you “deactivate” them. You then have a “balance due.” As soon as you acquire more days, the overage is subtracted from what you purchase. This very simple process insures that you will always have the resources needed to support workload requirements.

This new process for eCOD is only available on POWER8 Enterprise servers. The POWER8 servers, which will participate in this new process, will require the latest hardware microcode levels so the usage and account processes are available.

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