HP-UX System Administrator's Guide: Overview

Pay per use (PPU)
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Pay per use (PPU) is a product that enables you to “pay as you go”. Pay per use is a
pricing model in which you are charged for your actual usage of computing resources.
Technology Summary
With Pay per use, you treat computer processing capacity as you would electricity,
water, or other utilities. You acquire a specific hardware platform with a number of
cores and are charged for the actual usage based on one of the following HP contractual
agreements:
• Core percent utilization (percent core)
• Number of active cores (active core)
Tools to Administer/Configure
The Pay per use program uses a dedicated system known as the Utility Meter that is
set up by HP.
For servers you plan to use with Pay per use, you must set up a software agent (the
PPU Agent) on every partition (both hardware and software partitions). The PPU Agent
reports usage information to the Utility Meter which in turn communicates to HP your
actual usage.
A single Utility Meter can service up to 100 servers or partitions running HP-UX 11i
or Windows Server 2003.
Most of the configuration of the Pay per use components is done through the
ppuconfig command. ppuconfig can:
Load Balancing (One Multiple Core Server, One Operating System Instance) 33