IBM & Red Hat on AWS

Announcing license add-on for Db2 on AWS Marketplace.

IBM Db2 as a relational database is certainly not new to customers or on AWS. Recently Db2 has become available as an engine supported in Amazon Relation Database Service (RDS) with customers exploring shifting to managed and moving from their exiting Db2 or other engines to RDS for Db2.

One consideration with RDS for Db2 is that its only caters for Db2 Standard edition and Db2 Advanced edition licenses. For new Db2 customers this is rather straight forward as they have choice of buying directly from an IBM seller or via the AWS Marketplace as well as Bring your own licenses options if already on Std or Adv edition. For customers in an on premises context running older IBM Processor Value Unit (PVU) license based options there used to mean a change of Licensing.

IBM and AWS are proud to announce a license add-on for Db2.
With the introduction of the add-ons for IBM Db2 Advanced Enterprise Server Edition and IBM Db2 Enterprise Server Edition, IBM is expanding the BYOL model to include PVU-based licenses for these editions, enabling clients who purchase the add-ons to deploy their existing PVU licenses on Amazon RDS.

The newly introduced add-ons are:

Customers gain the following benefits:

  • Access to new features

The add-on opens the doors to the database features offered by Db2 Std and Adv editions, proving improved performance and broader recovery and resilience options.

  • Shift to cloud

The add-on will help Processor Value Unit (PVU) based customers shift to a Virtual Processor Core (VPC) licensing model which is compatible with Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2).

For the purposes of counting VPCs for the add-ons, when deploying the full vCPU capacity of the instance, IBM will consider 70 PVUs = 1 VPC = 1 physical core = 2 vCPUs for all EC2 instances that have published their physical core counts on the EC2 “Physical Cores by Amazon EC2 Instance Type” page, where the vCPU count is twice the physical cores (meaning hyperthreading or simultaneous multi-threading (SMT) degree is set to (2). See the CPU cores and threads per CPU core per instance type web page.

  • Shift to managed

The add-on will help customers reach their shift to cloud goals by having a VPC License option and support a shift to managed by providing a supported option on RDS. Which means customers can take advantage of the undifferentiated heavy lift benefit of RDS, where the customer focuses on the database and what is critical to their workloads and business, and AWS service and product teams take care of the database infrastructure.

Procurement:
Customers have choice and can procure these add-on features via their preferred channels including via AWS Marketplace or directly from their IBM account team. We have made this as easy as possible for customers.

Ryan Niksch

Ryan Niksch

Ryan Niksch is a Partner Solutions Architect focusing on application platforms, hybrid application solutions, and modernization. Ryan has worn many hats in his life and has a passion for tinkering and a desire to leave everything he touches a little better than when he found it.