Jon Finke
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Abstract
One feature of our campus-wide UNIX service is the wide selection
of scientific and engineering applications such as AutoCad,
Pro/ENGINEER, Maple, etc. We currently have 32 ``major application
packages'' site licensed, representing an annual cost of almost
$300,000. A number of the licenses were based on concurrent usage, so
around budget time, people started to ask if we had an appropriate
number of licenses.
By adapting some previously developed
software for tracking workstation use, we were able to determine who
was using which applications, and concurrent usage information for
these products and to reduce the number of concurrent users allowed to
reflect actual use (plus some headroom). By applying these figures to
just four applications, we were able to obtain a savings of $43,000
without cutting any service to our users.
This paper discusses
the methods we used to collect, process, and display this information,
as well as some of the problems we encountered.
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