9.2 HP Pay per use Utility Meter II Software Installation and Configuration Guide (December 2010)

1.5 Utility Pricing Solutions Web Portal
HP maintains a Web portal that displays the usage data for Utility Pricing Solutions (UPS) resources under
a PPU contract. The UPS Web portal is located at: http://www.hp.com/go/payperuse. The Web portal
uses the standard HP Passport single sign-in process. If you do not have a Passport ID, please click the
Register link. If you have an existing Passport ID, please click the Sign-in link. Registration to the portal is
free. The UPS Web portal provides usage information for the following UPS programs:
• Instant Capacity (iCAP)
• Pay per use (PPU)
• Utility Ready Storage (URS)
Viewing the usage of a UPS resource on the portal is secure because a unique identifier is required to register
a PPU server. (The unique identifier for a PPU WBEM Partition/Server can be found in the PPUOA usage
report in the <ComplexUUID> tag or by running the getconf CS_MACHINE_IDENT command on the
partitioned system.) Additionally, a customer may request that their PPU usage data not be viewable from
the UPS Web portal.
1.6 Usage Data Transport to HP
Usage data flows from UPS resources (server partitions) to the Utility Meter. HP’s PPU metering system is
designed with the customer’s security and confidentiality foremost in mind. The Utility Meter encrypts the
data before transmission to HP. Usage data flows unidirectionally from the Utility Meter to HP. No data,
invoices, or other potentially sensitive information ever flows from HP into your Utility Meter or PPU partitions.
The Utility Meter can be configured with either of the following data transport methods:
• HTTPS – HTTPS is the default data transport between the Utility Meter and HP. SSL encryption, using a
1024-bit key, is used to ensure data privacy. The HTTPS connection to HP can be through a proxy
server if the customer’s network does not permit direct HTTPS connections to the Internet. HTTPS is the
recommended data transport between the Utility Meter and HP. Traffic between the Utility Meter and
HP is only initiated from the Utility Meter side, never from the HP side.
• email – Customers can also choose to transport data using encrypted email. The email data transport
is unidirectional – it only transmits usage data from the Utility Meter to HP. The Utility Meter does not
receive any email from HP. A disadvantage of this data transport method is the absence of a
“closed-loop” receipt after the information was successfully transmitted to HP.
CAUTION: The datagram nature of email does not verify that usage data has reached HP. Consequently,
there is no retransmission mechanism to recover from transmission failures. Using the email transport can
result in lost usage data.
The frequency of usage reports sent from the Utility Meter to HP is 48 times per day per partition.
1.7 Missing Usage Reports
IMPORTANT: HP requires that an email address of a customer contact is configured and monitored as the
Utility Meter's system contact. This ensures that HP can send a notification email to the customer in case HP
does not receive PPU usage reports from the Utility Meter. HP recommends using an email alias or an email
distribution list as the contact email address for your Utility Meter.
PPU usage reports are written to the /var/opt/hp/RemoteSupport/umeter/data/sent directory.The
Utility Meter system retains the last 90 days of usage reports. For a complete history of your usage reports,
go to the Utility Pricing Solutions (UPS) Web portal. (For details of the UPS portal, see Section 1.5: “Utility
Pricing Solutions Web Portal”.)
HP computes the average system usage per day for a PPU contract. For the first 14 calendar days of missing
data, the missing data is copied from the last day HP could compute usage. After 14 days, HP assumes
100% utilization for PPU computing resources that did not report usage.
If on any given day usage data was collected for a minimum of 23/24 percent of the time the meter was
running, the PPU computing resources are considered to have sufficient usage data to compute the daily
average. If HP does not receive sufficient data, the missing data rule is triggered.
12 Introduction