Optimizing license management for the data center

31.10.2011
This vendor-written tech primer has been edited by Network World to eliminate product promotion, but readers should note it will likely favor the submitter's approach.

Optimizing license management is a key to decreasing application costs, but meeting the challenge requires technology and processes that can deal with heterogeneous, complex license environments that are made all the more complicated by adoption of .

In most companies, the data center infrastructure represents the most diverse computing environment in the organization. A typical enterprise will have an array of operating systems, including Sun Solaris, IBM AIX, HP-UX¸ RedHat , SuSE Linux, Fedora, CentOS, Server and more.

VMWORLD:

The only way to effectively manage licensing across this heterogeneous environment is via technology that automatically collects inventory for each physical and virtual server. Once the inventory is collected, it must be processed and normalized to identify hardware and software details and categorize server-based .

For software installations, the tool should be able to report publisher, title, version and edition. To accomplish this, the tool should easily integrate with the diverse set of inventory tools typically used today, including BMC/Tideway, IBM Tivoli and CA.