ACM extensions for Tailored Fit Pricing

The other three Limit Types provide costs savings in a TFP environment:

• CPC Busy Percentage
• MVS Busy Percentage
• Purchased Capacity Percentage

Software Cost Savings and Automated Monitoring

Implementing the CPC and MVS Busy Percentage Limit Types can reduce MSU consumption and provide cost savings in a TFP Software Consumption Solution environment.   By constraining lower importance workloads across multiple systems when CPU cycles are in danger of being overcommitted, batch and online applications as well as systems code run more efficiently, with lower CPI (cycles per instruction) values. 

This translates into fewer MSUs consumed and overall lower consumption reported by the SCRT to do the same workload.

In addition to software cost savings, with ACM monitoring CPC and/or MVS Busy, the need for manual monitoring of system busy indicators is eliminated.  ACM automatically reduces designated batch workloads as threshold values are reached.

Managing the TFP-HW Capacity Corridor

Since the TFP-HW Capacity Corridor is always available, when batch surges it can push overall CPC usage into the corridor generating extra hardware charges.  The TFP-HW corridor sits immediately above the Purchased Capacity of the CPC, the capacity that was paid for by the installation.  Once the Purchased Capacity is exceeded, the TFP-HW corridor is being used.

When the Purchased Capacity Percentage Limit Type is enabled, ACM will monitor the overall CPC usage and compare it to the Purchased Capacity, creating a percentage that is compared against the Capacity Level thresholds.  In the case of this Limit Type, the threshold values can be set as high as 150% of Purchased Capacity to allow some batch use of the TFP-HW corridor if desired.

ACM calculates the Purchased Capacity of each CPC, defined as the portion  of total capacity purchased by the installation that is currently assigned to the CPC. For CPCs not configured for Flexible Capacity for Cyber Resiliency, Purchased Capacity will always be equal to Permanent Capacity.  These CPCs do not need to be defined in the SLM Policy.

If Flexible Capacity capability is present, SLM will include the amount of active Flexible Capacity in its calculation of Purchased Capacity on that CPC.  When defining the Purchased Capacity Limit Type in the SLM Policy, you must specify each CPC which is configured for Flexible Capacity, supplying the corridor size and the potential maximum amount of Flexible Capacity.  CPCs without Flexible Capacity configured do not have to be defined.

When present, the TFP-HW corridor is the capacity immediately in excess of Permanent Capacity of the CPC and any active Flexible Capacity as applicable.