ADSM-L

Re: billing for adsm use

2000-05-12 17:51:40
Subject: Re: billing for adsm use
From: Eric LEWIS <eric.lewis AT CCMAIL.ADP.WISC DOT EDU>
Date: Fri, 12 May 2000 16:51:40 -0500
     We bill for usage, session I/O and monthly for occupancy.  The I/O
     comes from the accounting records, the occupancy from a query/select.

     Customer billing info is delimited in the Contact Field.

     Billing for usage is the only way to let customers/users choose their
     own retention policies because of the economic incentive the customer
     has to be reasonable.  This is important unless you have a central
     group with the complete resp. for determining how long to keep data
     and how many versions, etc.

     Eric Lewis UW-Madison


______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________
Subject: billing for adsm use
Author:  "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU> at IPNET
Date:    5/11/00 2:11 PM


I have been pondering methods of billing *SM usage back to our
customers. Our current method has some holes that I would like to close
or possibly completely rethink our methodology. Here goes.

We currently have two ADSM servers V3.1.2.50 running on AIX 4.2.1
RSC/6000 boxes. There are about 60 clients including Win NT, Win 95,
Netware, AIX, Solaris, Linux, etc. All are at ADSM V3.1 or higher.

We have the need to bill the customers for their part of total *SM
usage. Currently we do that by using the output of a
sql select from the occupancy table which looks a lot like output of "q
occupancy". Each customers percent of *SM storage is calculated and
billed as their part of total *SM cost. This works well in most cases
but there are a few that present more challenges.

For instance, let's say a AIX or Win NT client is only used by one
customer group. In that case all backup and archive storage can billed
to that customer group because the occupancy data is reported by client.
But, when the client is shared by several customers it becomes more
difficult. We need go down to the file system level within the client
and total each customers usage. This works fine for backup data.

Archive data can be a different story depending upon the client
platform. AIX clients archive data is reported down to the file system
level but in the case of Win NT it is only reported down to the volume
level. When customers share a volume the archive total is the sum of
those two customers usage. As far as I can tell, there is no way to get
a more granular accounting of storage.

I even went so far as to run a sql select from the contents table which
gives does give file sizes. Those file sizes could be totaled to get
usage. The only problem is that if the file is part of an aggregate, the
file size reported is the size of the aggregate, not the size of the file
within the aggregate. Why they did that I'll likely never know.

So, what do you all do out there in *SM land? Do you use the *SM
accounting data which reports data transmitted and ignore how much *SM
storage is being used? Some combination of both numbers?

Does TSM V3.7 provide more options for reporting storage use? We will
need to upgrade before year end but haven't yet decided wether the
server will still be AIX or some other platform.

Inquiring minds want to know!






Steve Bennett, (907) 465-5783
State of Alaska, Information Technology Group, Technical Services
Section
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