Chargebacks and SMI-S

At the hosting provider arm of Verizon Business in Basking Ridge, N.J., James Muell, a storage engineer, and Christopher Wilson, a storage architect, are working with vendors such as Hewlett-Packard Co. to develop the ability to map their applications -- especially for chargeback -- to back-end storage.

Because they work for a hosting provider with a wide range of storage infrastructure that predominantly includes products from EMC Corp., HP and 3PARdata Inc., Muell and Wilson have been able to tap into databases and capitalize on the read-only views they get of incoming data to develop their best-practices chargeback model. In their opinion, that model is held back by its singular reliance on allocation as the primary criterion.

The chargeback challenges they have encountered revolve around the complexity of integrating internally developed, one-off systems with the chargeback capabilities offered by vendors. This ultimately leads to developing custom code to bridge the incompatibility gaps. Muell's advice to other users who want to develop chargeback systems is to decide what they're going to charge for and build their business models accordingly. Currently, his hosting unit charges for allocated volume, but it is also possible to charge for usage. "We're really going to start charging for a specific service," he says. "Right now, we do that with backup."

He also advises users to minimize the number of vendors they involve with resource mapping. "You almost have to have two vendors, or maybe three, but more than that and it gets very difficult," he says.