On Thu, 17 Apr 2003, Stefano Coletta wrote:

> In my case the customer is supposed to pay for a "tape quota"... for
> example, 1Gb space for 3 installations.
> I need a mechanism to control if the overall storage of customers'
> servers are hitting/exceeding the quota they have paid.
>
> The 2 goals to achieve are:
> 1) to be informed about overflows in relation to every purchased
> customer quota and even to notify the customer
> 2) to effectively deny the backup if the client has exceeded his quota

Interesting.  I am looking at offering amanda backups on a billing
basis, too.  My model is not yet decided upon, but I was thinking of
something simpler.  Something along the lines of a fixed $x/GB billing
rate without any quota or possibility of denying a backup.  That seems
fairly easy to implement just by post-processing the logs or e-mail
reports.

Can I ask why you've ruled out doing it this way?  Is it so the
customer can have a predictable bill without unexpected surprises?

The thought of denying a backup worries me.  If the customer's machine
implodes and when they come for their backup data to rebuild the
machine they hear "Sorry, your backup never happened because you were
over quota", I'm just imagining that this would make them far more
pissed than getting an unexpectedly large bill and having to tell
their staff to take it easy on the disk usage.

It's your business and certainly your call what model to use.  I'm
just curious what led you to this model, mainly because of my interest
in offering a similar service to my customers.

-Mitch