How to Size and Price a BonFire
System
With the exception
of BonFire Lite, BonFire software licensing is priced
based upon a fixed fee per system together with a licensing
charge per usable terabyte of ESS or ZFS storage. In
the case of both ESS and ZFS, usable space is a function of
the drive count and size less any hot spare or parity RAID
drives, and further less a percertage of free space
inaccessible by users. (For both ESS and ZFS, we
recommend a mandatory freespace level of 10%.) All this can
be expressed in the formula:
size = ( dc - ( hs + pd ) ) * st * 0.9
where:
dc = the SSD or HDD gross drive count
hs = is the count of hot spare drives
pd = is the count of parity drives
st = is the decimal terabyte size of each drive
To determine usable terabytes, take the gross count
of drives (or SSDs) (gross). Then deduct all the mirror or parity drives (raid),
as well as any hot spares (spares). Multiply what is left by
the decimal terabytes per drive (tbsize). Then deduct 10% as unbilled mandatory free space.
Finally, round the result up to the next whole decimal
terabyte.
As an example, a 24 SSD
set of 1 terabyte SSDs, configured RAID-6 with one hot spare
would require a license as shown:
size
= ( 24 - ( 1 + 2 ) ) * 1 * 0.9
size = 21 * 1 * 0.9
size = 18.9
size = 19tb when rounded up to the
next whole decimal terabyte
This calculation can also
be applied to ZFS-managed hard disks or ESS solid
state disks as appropriate. To this, you will
have to add the charges for the appropriate HA, compression, and
encryption services as desired, as well as an appropriate
annual support program.
Those seeking more speed
from hard disks can use ZFS /x1 and /x2. In this case,
the usable space will be half or less of the gross
space. RAID-0 and RAID-10 can also be used with ESS.
RAID-10 is generally not desirable with ESS. High
Availability pairs and clusters are more reliable than
simple mirroring. Similarly, parity RAID, especially
RAID-6, offers reliability advantages over mirroring, while
offering (in the case of ESS) much higher write performance.
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