Question

Does Acumatica limit server performance by license tier with a Private Cloud subscription, or not?

  • 22 October 2022
  • 4 replies
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R
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Acumatica markets its software as being sold based on the number of transactions the customer performs. So in theory, it should not care about the hardware specs of an individual client server that is running Private Cloud, as long as they are operating within the limitations of their transaction count (Acumatica will care with regards to servers it hosts on clients’ behalf, because there is a cost impact to Acumatica of provisioning more performant/expensive servers).

However, if you look at the help documentation, you get statements like this with regards to Private Cloud subscriptions (https://help.acumatica.com/Help?ScreenId=ShowWiki&pageid=54ef574c-0adf-48a0-b5be-d3438a6e5400):

When your organization purchases a Private Cloud Subscription (PCS) or Private Cloud Perpetual (PCP) license for Acumatica ERP, your purchase manager selects a License Tier, which limits the parameters that influence system performance. The License Tiers are grouped into the following series:

  • S Series: Includes the S1, S2, and S3 Tiers
  • M Series: Includes the M1, M2, and M3 Tiers
  • L Series: Includes the L1, L2, L3, and L4 Tiers
  • X Series: Includes the X1, X2, X3, and X4 Tiers
  • E Series: Includes the E1, E2, E3, E4, and E5 Tiers

This topic contains typical server configurations for PCS and PCP licenses that depend on the series of your License Tier, the software requirements for the server part of the system, and the system requirements for workstations.

The chart below shows the server specs by license tier:

 

Can we please get a definitive statement from Acumatica on whether or not server performance is being capped within the software by license tier?

We would like to be able to throw as much (or as little) server at our system when running Private Cloud, and don’t see any reason why Acumatica should care, based on the current stated licensing regime. But based on the bolded/underlined statement above, it seems like there may be performance limitations in the software by license tier. So please clarify this….even the VARs don’t seem to know the answer to this one.

4 replies

robk20
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A PCS subscription that was initially purchased on or after April 1st, 2018 can be deployed on premise or within a private cloud data center with greater resources than the “Recommended” (NOT mandatory) specifications for a “standard” Acumatica Cloud ERP instance and Acumatica Cloud ERP. 

If you have a Consumption-Based subscription, increasing server resources can enable more concurrent users to be able to use your Acumatica Cloud ERP instance with optimal performance than what is recommended for that Transaction Tier in the System Recommendations table within the Acumatica License Guide, which can be found at https://www.acumatica.com/agreements/. It can also enable more transaction volume per hour or day to be processed with acceptable performance than the System Recommendations for that Transaction Tier.

If you have a User-Based subscription, increasing your server resources can enable more Commercial Transactions and ERP Transactions to be processed within Acumatica Cloud ERP instance with optimal performance than what is recommended for that number of concurrent users in the System Recommendations of the Acumatica License Guide. As with the Consumption-Based model, it can also enable more transaction volume per hour or day to be processed with acceptable performance than the System Recommendations for that number of concurrent users.

System Constraints (see pages 17 and 18 of the Acumatica Licensing Guide), however, are parameters that are “capped” according to what Transaction Tier or to the number of Concurrent Users that you have licensed. They can be increased by upgrading your Transaction Tier and/or adding one or more additional Processing Nodes.

R
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@robk20 I have read the Licensing Guide sections you reference. It seems that most of the “hard” limitations on system usage really relate to simultaneous web service calls, which are things that are generally happening outside of the core system... web services are generally used for synchronization to third party systems).

However, there is no statement one way or the other on whether there is any performance limitation within the software, that is tied to license tier. If you license at the top tier, does ths software support additional CPU cores, or additional server resource that the lower level subscriptions do not? As I mentioned in my original post, the guide refers to the licensing tiers ”influencing the parameters that impact system performace”. This seems to be alluding to there being possible hard limitations inside the software, but without reference to any specific technical subject matter that would make it definitive one way or another.

It would be nice to get a definitive statement from Acumatica’s technical team on whether the software has internal governing of system performance by license tier or not. It seems like perhaps not, but why should we have to speculate?

robk20
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If you have a Consumption-Based subscription of Acumatica that was purchased on or after April 1st, 2018, the “hard limitations” of the your license are:

  • The total number of Monthly Commercial Transactions
  • The total number of Monthly ERP transactions
  • The System Constraints shown in Table 6 of the Acumatica Licensing Guide

If you have a Concurrent User-Based subscription of Acumatica that was purchased on or April 1st, 2018, the “hard limitations” of your license are:

  • The maximum total number of users concurrently in your instance at any one time
  • The System Constraints shown in Table 6 of the Acumatica Licensing Guide

The bullet points above are not “most” of the “hard” limitations; they ARE the “hard” limitations. The Licensing Guide has no intentional allusions to possible hard limitations inside the software other than the ones I listed above and none should be construed.

Prior to April 1st, 2018, there were Acumatica Cloud ERP licensing options available that were based on how many CPU cores were utilized by the instance’s server. That is not the case for licenses purchased on or after April 1, 2018.

It is quite common for businesses who have (or will be) deploying an Acumatica Cloud ERP PCS subscription to increase the server resources above the recommended levels in order to address their special business requirements to ensure optimal performance.

For example, if fictional startup company RosenJon Inc has only 15 employees but they are generating 10,000 orders a month, they could license a Concurrent User-Base Acumatica PCS subscription for 15 concurrent users and then scale the server up to or beyond the recommendations for a server supporting an L2 or L3 implementation to ensure optimal performance.

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@robk20 The licensing guide contradicts what you are saying. Below is a screenshot from the guide. Acumatica carves out “System Recommendations” vs. “System Constraints”. Recommendations are the limits that Acumatica suggests in order to have optimal system performance. Constraints are hard limitations that are either strictly enforced, or generate warnings that may lead to strict enforcement.

https://www.acumatica.com/media/2022/04/Acumatica-Licensing-Guide-2022-Apr.pdf#page=1&view=FitH,0&zoom=95,0,0&toolbar=1&navpanes=0

 

You can see that the constraints are all things like “Web Service API Users”, “Concurrent Web Service Requests”, “Web Service Requests Per Minute”, as well as database performance correlatives like “Lines per transaction” and “Serial Numbers per Document”.

System Recommendations are things like “Concurrent Users”, “Daily Commerical Transaction Volume”, “Hourly Commercial Transaction Volume”, and “Daily ERP Transaction Volume”.

I still think my request is reasonable. Per my original post, Acumatica ties PCS license tiers to specific server hardware spec recommendations, but then doesn’t say definitively whether the licensing tier is throttled at the software level. Understand that in software sales, this type of performance throttling by product tier is done all the time. If you license SQL Server Standard vs. Enterprise Edition, you will not get all the performance optimizations for running SQL Server at scale that you will get with the Enterprise product. In addition, I have already referenced this phrase straight out of Acumatica’s help docs, which alludes to potential performance throttling without stating it explicitly: your purchase manager selects a License Tier, which limits the parameters that influence system performance. 

My concern is also that the ambiguity is possibly on purpose, to allow for future wiggle room with regards to licensing specs. If 2 years from now, Acumatica decides they want to throttle the product based on licensing tier, in order to sell performance optimizations under the hood that may not exist today, they could do so by pointing to their current licensing guide, which literally states the type of hardware specs you can expect to be able to run with various tiers of their software. So I think a little clarity here would be useful. Is the product, today [or in the future], going to be throttled in any way based on the license tier you subscribe to for PCS?

 

 

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