Carefully.
Ahem.
This is a fairly big topic. Some questions:
#1. Do you have an existing chargeback model that you are looking to implement with OCI, or are you looking for help establishing a chargeback model for the first time?
#2. What do you want to chargeback:
Block storage only?
Block + NAS storage?
Block + NAS storage + VM?
#3. Do you want to do your chargeback reporting out of OCI, or do you want OCI to feed another system?
The reasons I ask these questions:
#1. OCI has a Chargeback data mart that has some preconceived notions on how to do chargeback, however, you are not necessarily married to use of this approach - we have some customers who want to pro-rate billing at the host level - i.e, host X supports 17 applications - charge each application's business unit 1/17th of the host's capacity. Our data warehouse is a pretty robust solution that can often answer questions in ways we haven't thought about.
#2. When we think about the different aspects of block vs nas vs VM, it can help inform how we will deploy OCI, and what metadata, or "annotations" will be required.
OCI has a well thought out annotation functionality - you can label luns, flexvols, hosts, VMs, etc with "Data Center", "Application" , "Business Unit", etc - some customers want to chargeback each VM's owner for the allocated size of the VMDKs. Some shops simply want to chargeback LUNs.
#3. OCI has a enterprise class business intelligence platform, but some customers have existing billing platforms. I have a customer that was looking to do comprehensive IT chargeback, but had a massing NAS flexvol / VMDK / LUN capacity reporting + business owner gap. We worked with them in a POC to show them how to discover, and label their assets, and then extract the data feeds they were looking for via SQL to populate their billing platform that will additionally include other feeds that OCI will never address - such as datacenter rack units, etc.
We'd love to do a chargeback focused demo for you, 60 minutes would do it justice. I will follow up with you via PM.
Matt
