Storage Nation

This is a series of posts covering the subject of Storage Management.  Previous posts: The Four Pillars of Storage Management Four Pillars: Service Four Pillars: The Service Catalogue In any system, resources are finite.  There is always a limitation to what is available.  However there’s also a truism that states if resources are free then they will be consumed at an infinite rate.  So it is with storage.  Someone has to pay for the storage resources that are placed on the floor.  If customers are not charged in some way for their consumption of storage, then they will continue to consume resources ad infinitum.  The solution is to implement chargeback or, to be more precise, billing. Definition It’s worth pausing for a moment and discussing the terms Chargeback and Billing .  When computing was first made available as timesharing, customers were billed for their usage of the shared system.  The billing unit may have been time, CPU resources or some combination of metrics that represented utilisation.  Mainframe resources were so expensive that there had to be an efficient charging mechanism.   The concept of billing is something that was intrisically built into the mainframe design and even to this day, resources can be tracked using records produced by SMF ( System Management Facility ) and reported on through RMF ( Resource Measurement Facility ).  So billing represented a method of charging for usage that wasn’t directly related to the underlying hardware

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Enterprise Computing: 4 Pillars – Service: Chargeback