Wednesday, 26 February 2014

Using Systems Capacity Data for Business Intelligence ( 6 of 9) Costs and Capacity Data

Costs and Capacity Data
A lot of people get very nervous when you start to discuss chargeback, as chargeback can be very complicated and often times is not easily implemented.
You can start simply, without accounting, and it is useful for both you and the users/departments to know exactly who is using what from the total resources.
I’ve given an example below which looks at the top 10 applications and how much of our total storage they are using.
In this instance the large chunk of lilac at the bottom traced back to IT and this is something that you must also factor in – chances are with things like data warehousing and testing IT are heavy consumers in their own right.
Simple chargeback schemes can encourage savings but be sure to include the IT department in your calculations.
Multiple cost tiers for resources can encourage further savings as high end storage carries a much higher cost.
In this scenario our client encouraged users of high end storage to migrate to lower cost storage if it was not really necessary and made significant savings.

Visibility into the cost of consuming resources can be simple
In this example the resource is shown as the turquoise bar chart and the actual cost is shown as the dark blue line.
A simple chart but very effective when talking to your users as you can start to talk in monetary terms about the IT resources that they are consuming.
On Monday I’ll be looking at creating a plan.
Dale Feiste
Consultant

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