Capacity-Based Total License Usage

Total license usage is used to calculate billing for Service Providers and can be based on capacity-based (per TB) licenses. Capacity-based licenses are calculated differently than entity-based (per unique device, user, mailbox, or other entity) licenses.

In capacity-based total license usage, usage is calculated by taking the largest data protection job for a client during the time period (one month), regardless of whether the client is still actively used at the end on of the billing period. This means that out of all jobs for a given client, the software uses the largest full backup job or synthetic full backup job for that month as the total. The size of the largest job is used to reflect the usage for that client for the entire month, even if the client is removed before the end of the month. The sum of all of the largest jobs for all unique clients is the total usage billed.

For example, if within the month (in this example, a 30-day period) a Service Provider sees the following jobs:

In this case, the total usage for Client AAA is 22 TB, and that is the amount used to calculate the Service Provider's billing.

This amount (22 TB) differs from what the Commcell administrator might see in a Usage or License Summary report that runs locally in the CommCell environment, particularly if the client was deconfigured or deleted before the end of the month. Local CommCell usage reports display only a snapshot of the current license usage and do not reflect the total capacity license that the (possibly deleted or deconfigured) client computer uses.

If the backup is still retained but the client is deconfigured its usage will still be considered during the month in which it is deconfigured.

If no backup job has ever run for a client then no usage is billed. However, if a backup job ran for the client, whatever job was calculated as the largest job, remains the largest job into the following time period until either the backup job retention period expires or a new job runs in the following time period. At the end of the month, the total license usage is reset, and if a new job runs, then a new largest backup job determines the usage billing.

As a continuation of the example above, if Client AAA ran no jobs in Month 2, and assuming the retention period was 90 days, the total for that client would be last calculated job size of the retained data set, which would be 3 TB.

The counters reset to 0 on the 1st day of each month.

However, if another set of jobs ran, the total is recalculated for the following month:

In this case the new total for Month 2 would be 15 TB, replacing the total of 22 TB from the previous month.