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Cloud Tiering

How licensing works

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Pay for Cloud Tiering through a pay-as-you-go subscription, an ONTAP tiering license called FabricPool, or a combination of both. A 30-day free trial is available for your first cluster if you don't have a license.

Note A license isn't required when tiering data to StorageGRID.

30-day free trial

If you don't have a FabricPool license, a 30-day free trial of Cloud Tiering starts when you set up tiering to your first cluster. After that 30-day free trial ends, you'll need to pay for Cloud Tiering through a pay-as-you-go subscription, a FabricPool license, or a combination of both.

If your free trial ends and you haven't subscribed or added a license, then ONTAP no longer tiers cold data to object storage, but existing data is still available for access.

Pay-as-you-go subscription

Cloud Tiering offers consumption-based licensing in a pay-as-you-go model. After subscribing through your cloud provider's marketplace, you pay per GB for data that's tiered—​there’s no up-front payment. You are billed by your cloud provider through your monthly bill.

You should subscribe even if you have a free trial or if you bring your own license (BYOL):

  • Subscribing ensures that there’s no disruption of service after your free trial ends.

    When the trial ends, you’ll be charged hourly according to the amount of data that you tier.

  • If you tier more data than allowed by your FabricPool license, then data tiering continues through your pay-as-you-go subscription.

    For example, if you have a 10 TB license, all capacity beyond the 10 TB is charged through the pay-as-you-go subscription.

You won't be charged from your pay-as-you-go subscription during your free trial or if you haven't exceeded your FabricPool license.

Learn how to set up a pay-as-you-go subscription.

Bring your own license

Bring your own license by purchasing an ONTAP FabricPool license from NetApp. You can purchase term-based or perpetual licenses.

After you purchase a FabricPool license, you'll need to add it to the cluster, which you can do directly from Cloud Tiering.

After you activate the license through Cloud Tiering, if you purchase additional add-on capacity at a later time, the license on the cluster is automatically updated with the new capacity. There's no need to apply a new NetApp License File (NLF) to the cluster.

As noted above, we recommend that you set up a pay-as-you-go subscription, even if your cluster has a BYOL license.

Contact us to purchase a license.