Are you charging for storage on Isilon

[Donald King]

Hey guys - love this group - it has given me a ton of great info to use in my environment.  This is my first post and I am going to perhaps stray from the technical here.  My question is this:  are any of you using a charge back model to recover storage costs from other departments within your organizations?  If so, I would love to know what you charge and how you structure the charges.  Is it based on consumption or quota?  Is it a flat rate or do you charge based on the Isilon tier?  Do you add additional charges if the data is backed up to tape or some other device?

Currently our cluster is composed of all X series nodes.  We charge our end users / departments $1,000 per year per terabyte - based on quota and not what they actually use.  We bill them monthly at $83.33 per TB.  So if a group wants a 3TB share - we bill them $3,000 yearly ($249.99 monthly) regardless of how much of that share they actually consume.

I will be expanding my cluster soon with some NL nodes and Smart Pool licensing.  I plan to keep the charge of $1,000 per year per TB for data on the X nodes, and $700 per year per TB for data on the NL nodes, and offer it as a lower end storage tier.  Some of our users need space and not speed - others are using instruments that need high throughput when writing.

I would love to hear how some of you are handling this in your environments.  Any info is appreciated!

[Chris Pepper]

Donald,

We have 6*32000x-ssd connected to a small shared HPC cluster. Every user gets 1tb in /ifs/x/home included with their (charged) account, and we charge each lab/group based on group utilization in /ifs/x/data, using daily SmartQuota reports, averaged over the month.

Our charges effectively include NL storage for replications, because users cannot reliably determine what needs to be backed up, and Murphy says the day of a major failure is they day they will realize something should have been in a higher-reliability pool.

We provide snapshots for self-service restore.

Chris

[Skylar Thompson]

On 11/04/2013 11:10 AM, Donald King wrote:
> Hey guys - love this group - it has given me a ton of great info to use
> in my environment. This is my first post and I am going to perhaps
> stray from the technical here. My question is this: are any of you
> using a charge back model to recover storage costs from other
> departments within your organizations? If so, I would love to know what
> you charge and how you structure the charges. Is it based on
> consumption or quota? Is it a flat rate or do you charge based on the
> Isilon tier? Do you add additional charges if the data is backed up to
> tape or some other device?

We don't do this for our Isilon clusters (these are owned outright by a
very large group we support), but we do operate two cost center "condo"
models for other storage. Neither of them include FTE - we are grant
funded and it would be an accounting nightmare to try to separate costs
associated with the cost center from the costs directly billed to the
grants.

For disk, we allow our labs to purchase storage at a rate of $1000/TB/4
years. This charge covers the cost of the storage, and the cost of the
controllers. It does not cover any backup or archive storage. The
storage is quota'd and they are not charged after their initial
purchase; however, after four years they must either renew on whatever
storage is currently in the cost center, or find another home for it.

For tape, we sell metered usage at the rate of $56/TB/year. This
includes both an onsite and an offsite media, tape libraries, and
offsite vaulting charges. The rate is the same whether it is a backup or
an archive.

We are about to roll out a third tape rate, which would be ~$100/TB/6
years (we haven't nailed down the exact cost w/ our budget folks yet).
There can be no retention changes nor can the data be moved after 6
years; it just goes away. The idea with this is that we can avoid all
the time and cost of migrating between tape media. By choosing a 6 year
retention we can hope to be running tape drives that can read (but not
write) tapes that we bought and wrote six years prior.

Skylar

[Donald King]

Thanks for the replies - it is interesting to see how different this can be across organizations.