Cold standby licensing

I am replacing a system where the customer keeps a duplicate of their main PC available on-site in case the main PC fails.

Given that this is a cold standby and the 2 PCs will never run at the same time, is there any way we can use the same FSQL/FPMI licence to cover both machines? It would be OK to have to re-register the second one over the web, but only if this could be done in a speedy fashion to avoid too much downtime.

First of all, if downtime is truly a concern, I recommend a clustered system using our redundancy and clustering architecture (see architecture diagram here and pricing here)

You of can course can have a cold standby system ready, and switch it over in case of failure of the first machine. Remember, a non-activated system will run for 2 hours at a time indefinately in trial mode, which would work in a pinch until you could call us and explain that the server crashed to get another activation for your CD-Key.

The requirement to have another PC available on-site comes from the customer’s insurers, I think. Your pricing model works well for a central server with lots of View nodes, but this installation is a standalone machine, so paying for 2 servers looks quite expensive. I don’t think I could realistically ask the customer to restart the FSQL, FPMI and reporting plugin licences every 2 hours. The customer’s current software uses a hardware dongle, so swapping to a standby PC is not an issue.

An hour or two of downtime while another PC was installed would not be a problem, but a whole day (or even weekend) would not be acceptable. It is obviously more of an issue here due to the 8 hour time difference between us.

I’ve worked with other software which used software licensing, and which had the facility of issuing time-limited keys. Would it be possible to issue a standby key which would last several days to tide us over any gap?

I like that idea - ( the time limited CD -key idea). It isn’t something that we can do with our current licensing architecture, but it could be done.