Best way to be equitable is via usage based charging, ala cell phone billing. First goal is to get a figure for the total costs that you want to recover from all your customers and over what period. Let's say it's 100 dollars over 1 year.
Then you figure out some categories to charge back for. Cell phones get minutes or text messages. For servers you want things like CPU and memory that are easy to gather via z/VM accounting records. So let's try to recover 25% of our costs by charging for memory. So find out how much memory all your servers will be using (lets say 10GB over 1 year) and come up with a rate per GB of memory and charge each server some rate per month or year. Note that this won't be exact because what you forecast and what you really end up with over a time period might be more or less, so you might over or under charge. It's not an exact science. Do the same thing with CPU. Estimate total CPU for all servers for some period then divide that into your $75 to get a rate per CPU second. This is hard the first couple years until you build some history of how much different servers consume. But this is basically what phone companies do to come up with a per second rate. If you end up getting too much money back, you can use that to enhance your services, or rebate back to your customers, or lower rates next time around. If you undercharge, you raise your prices next cycle. __________________________________ Tom Stewart Infrastructure Analyst John Deere - z/OS Support Services em: [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________ -----Original Message----- From: Linux on 390 Port [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Mike Hamner Sent: Tuesday, July 01, 2008 2:41 PM To: [email protected] Subject: Costing Model for Linux-390 I'm new to this group. We are also a new z/Linux shop and are currently bringing up z/Linux. We are trying to determine a good costing methodology to apply to this environment to be able to distribute cost back to our customers in an equitable manner. Does anyone have experience with doing this and have you defined a cost model strategy that you would be willing to share? Michael E. Hamner, CDCP IT Architect/Engineer Chief Technology Office National Business Center U.S. Department of Inerior 7301 W. Mansfield Ave. Denver Co. 80235 303-969-6619 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
