HP Intros Enclosure-based Red Hat Licenses For Blades

New blade servers from Hewlett-Packard will soon be available with a new enclosure-based licensing option for Linux.

At LinuxWorld in San Francisco on Tuesday, HP introduced a bundle featuring BladeSystem enclosures and an enclosure license for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

The typical OS license for blade servers and standard servers requires one license per unit, said Rick Becker, general manager and vice president for HP's BladeSystems. However, customers who buy the new bundle starting sometime next month will get one license that covers up to 17 devices within the BladeSystem enclosure, including SAN switches, IP switches and up to eight servers or storage devices, he said.

The bundled licensing arrangement will result in a lower cost compared with buying individual licenses for all of the devices within the enclosure, according to Becker. However, pricing has yet to be determined, he said.

The new licensing scheme is possible thanks to modifications to the BladeSystem enclosure's intelligent backplane to allow repurposing and management of the servers, storage devices, and SAN and IP configurations within, Becker said. "With the new license, you can repurpose or redeploy within the enclosure without worrying about relicensing," he said.

Channel partners, especially, will be interested in the new bundles, Becker added. "It lets solution providers service their customers with enterprise-class Linux environments in a blade chassis," he said. "It also lets them seamlessly sell Red Hat networks ready-to-go, with all devices in the enclosure already registered. It saves them time, giving them more time to service and sell to customers."