Storage Chargebacks
FileCensus can provide you with the information you need to successfully calculate, bill and then justify storage
consumption across your enterprise cross-platform environment. The FileCensus approach is unique to allow dedicated
and shared disk and tape resources to be allocated to individual cost-centers with accuracy.
Many companies are moving toward ILM and looking at classification and implementing different policy to cover
varied departmental needs. Charge across your cost center and department can help drive policy setting and valuation
requirements. Multi-tiered disk HSM and systems are not a problem!
Rather than treating all users the same, FileCensus historical snapshots have already collected information (meta-data)
on files within your shared directories. This approach gives you visibility on all enterprise users to allocate costs
with accuracy based on creation, consumption and usage. Our XML interface also allows larger organizations to import
their HR employee/ cost-center data before each billing cycle to ensure each user is accounted and relevant charges
can be dispatched to each department via a FileCensus URL. FileCensus administration can cater for monthly costs
fluctuations, decreases and new infrastructures.
This user pay system allows your IT department to design different policies and infrastructure for your individual
cost-centers with respect to: performance, consumption, usage and different cost disk and tape options.
Detailed Chargeback
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FileCensus allows department managers to analyze the relationship between functional area and storage cost. FileCensus
allows departmental managers to confirm that the charges were fair and accurate. They can determine which area of
their business can achieve savings by reducing data holdings or moving data to a cheaper class of storage. Department
managers now have visibility and therefore control of their storage expenditure. FileCensus can integrate with your
existing HR system so that users and cost centers never have to be maintained twice.
Enterprise Chargeback
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This example demonstrates how FileCensus is used to determine the cost based on a one day snapshot of your storage
infrastructure. FileCensus presents cost details by organisational units that can be charged by entire servers,
volumes or just a collection of directories. The cost for each file is calculated based on the current cost of
storage technology used and summarised by the chargeback report.
FileCensus also provides sophisticated Monthly level reporting which determines storage costs for each day of the
month, delivering real usage costs, not just at some point in time.
