User's Manual

Temporary Instant Capacity
You can purchase an amount of temporary processing capacity for your Instant Capacity system.
Temporary Instant Capacity, or TiCAP, is purchased in units of processing days. TiCAP allows
one or more cores beyond the count allowed by the available usage rights to be activated for up
to the specified period of prepaid minutes without requiring the purchase of additional usage
rights.
You can activate and deactivate cores according to your needs until the activation time equals
your prepaid temporary capacity duration. For example, with a prepaid duration of 30 days of
temporary capacity, you can activate one core for 30 days, or four cores for one hour a day for
180 days (or any combination that totals 43,200 minutes).
NOTE: Temporary Instant Capacity cannot be used to activate inactive Instant Capacity cell
boards or memory. To activate cores on an inactive cell board, you must first activate the cell
board and its memory either by using newly purchased cell and memory usage rights or by
deactivating a cell board and memory elsewhere in the server.
Your temporary capacity balance is decreased only when you are using more cores than normally
allowed by your available core usage rights. The charge against temporary capacity is not
associated with specific cores or partitions. That is, if you use temporary capacity to activate one
core in partition A, and then you deactivate any core in partition B, the complex stops using
temporary capacity.
The Instant Capacity software uses the debiting of temporary capacity to track the noncompliance
of a system, as described in “Instant Capacity Compliance and Enforcement” (page 38).
TiCAP can be added to an Instant Capacity system by purchasing and applying a temporary
capacity codeword (available from the Utility Pricing Solutions portal) using the icapmodify -C
command.
The icapstatus command provides information about the amount of temporary capacity time
remaining on the complex.
For more information about temporary capacity, see Chapter 5: “Temporary Instant Capacity”
(page 75). For a discussion of temporary capacity in a GiCAP group, see Chapter 7.
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