9.6 HP Pay per use Utility Meter II Software Installation and Configuration Guide (October 2012)

Installation and Configuration Guide
Chapter 1: Introduction
Utility Pricing Solutions Web Portal
HP maintains a Web portal that displays the usage data for Utility Pricing Solutions (UPS)
resources under a PPU or URS 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:
l Instant Capacity (iCAP)
l Pay per use (PPU)
l 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 or URS disk array. 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. For URS, the disk array's serial
number, meter ID (available on GUI or through the umadmin info command), and product ID are
required. Additionally, a customer may request that their PPU or URS usage data not be viewable
from the UPS Web portal.
Usage Data Transport to HP
Usage data flows from UPS resources (server partitions and disk arrays) 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 or URS devices.
The Utility Meter can be configured with either of the following data transport methods:
l 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.
l email (SMTP) – 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 has been 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
like there is with HTTPS. Consequently, using the email transport can result in lost usage
data.
The frequency of usage reports sent from the Utility Meter to HP are:
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