Overview of usage charges

IBM's goal is to provide a charging methodology that is manageable and understandable, one that minimizes administration, technical complexity, and operational impact while providing value-related charges for the customer. This methodology has the additional goal of also being appropriate (and optional) for the parallel sysplex environment.

z/OS® supports the Usage License Charges (ULC) that works with OS/390® Version 2.

Usage License Charges (ULC) is the usage pricing option available to users of z/OS and to users of OS/390 Version 2 or higher after January 1, 1999. MVS/ESA and OS/390 Version 1 users continue to use Measured Usage License Charges (MULC) for usage pricing. OS/390 Version 2 customers who were already using MULC before January 1, 1999 may continue to use it, or switch to ULC.

Important: No new MULC users will be permitted after December 1, 1998. Customers who discontinue MULC after January 1, 1999 cannot restart MULC later.

Though the eligibility and pricing structures for MULC and ULC are different, their implementation is very similar. For more information about eligibility to use ULC and MULC, see Eligible IBM products.

Both the ULC and the MULC pricing methodologies attempt to reduce the additional administration, technical complexity, and operational impact potentially associated with measured usage by:

Extending the existing MVS™ System Management Facilities (SMF) mechanism to automatically measure product usage for any product that registers and requests the usage measurement services.
Providing a reporting function in the form of a post-processor program that calculates and reports product usage based on the usage data measured by SMF.

It is the responsibility of each product (such as CICS® and IMS™), not the installation, to identify itself to MVS and request the appropriate set of measurement functions. Because most installations already use SMF to track, report, and bill many hardware and software activities, this use of SMF takes advantage of the many SMF procedures and jobs these installations use.

System programmers activate usage measurement functions by changing SYS1.PARMLIB and using the MVS "SET SMF=xx" command. These actions need only be performed once per MVS image, while the product specific activities must be performed once per product per MVS image. A summary of these activities are listed under Usage pricing start-up guidelines.