SmartLM

SmartLM: Grid-friendly software licensing for location independent application execution

Current software licensing practices are limiting the acceleration of Grid adoption. Indeed, the rapid emergence of service and virtualization environments requires a rapid evolution in licensing models. SmartLM will provide a generic and flexible licensing virtualization technology for new service-oriented business models across organization boundaries. One of the main goals, and the biggest challenge, for SmartLM is to balance customer needs and vendor requirements.

The mission of SmartLM is to provide a new generic licensing virtualization framework based on standards, and integrate it in major Grid middleware solutions.

The strategic objectives of SmartLM are:

• To understand the licensing requirements for Grid and Cloud use and deployment in the commercial environment, involving software vendors, application service providers, IT integrators, resource providers and end users.

• To identify service-oriented business models for distributed scenarios across organizations.

• To design and build a secured platform-independent licensing management framework.

• To provide models and technologies for accounting and billing of licenses.

• To enable and validate the licensing management tools with commercial applications deployed in Grids.

The organizations that run the project are Atos Origin, Fraunhofer SCAI, Jülich Research Centre, Cineca, INTES GmbH, Ansys, LMS International, The 451 Group, T-Systems-SfR, Centro de Supercomputación de Galicia, and Gridcore AB. The project kicked off in February of 2008, with a duration of 30 months.

Looking at the impact

The development of a Grid and Cloud-aware software licensing integrates into service-oriented architectures (SOA) will significantly bolster grid and cloud deployments generally - but specially into new areas exploiting a broad range of commercial software, beyond boundaries of technical computing and high performance computing.

NEWS: Coming soon: SMARTLM prototype ready in spring 2010.

SmartLM project will release a prototype demonstrating the project results. SmartLM aims at rendering mechanisms for managing and using software licenses in a more fair and flexible way. SmartLM licenses may be used seamlessly in local cluster environments, as well in local or remote Grid and Cloud environments, and under circumstances that the SOA concept presents.

The major innovations of SmartLM are:

• Licenses may be used to run applications in Grid and Cloud environments no matter whether during the application run there is network connectivity to access the site that host the license server that issued the license.

• SmartLM provides access to and management of all licenses owned by a site.

• SmartLM allows the definition of local policies for license usage addressing the site specific needs.

• With SmartLM  an accurate, user-specific prices is calculated beforehand based on a large number of configurable parameters, like the time of usage, the features, the history of usage, local policies…

• In SmartLM budget limitations are checked and enforced when a user request a license.

• SmartLM realizes a number of sophisticated, state-of-the-art security mechanisms that render illegal use almost impossible.

• SmartLM offers re-negotiation of license terms at run-time, e.g. giving up a license before the reservation period is over, trying to extend a reservation period, or adding new features.

• Through SmartLM an Application Service Provider (ASP) can temporally host the customer’s licenses allowing the execution of applications using the customer’s own licenses. 

Moreover the above mentioned technical innovations, SmartLM introduce a new business model ‘Extension of License’ that enables users to extend their license on demand. Users can use the software and only pay per what they use. This is a crucial benefit for end users, especially SMEs, who usually are limited because they cannot afford to buy expensive licenses.

Prototype will be ready the next spring, the consortium is willing to offer free trials to the first users, be one of them!

For more information visit: www.smartlm.eu