Re: Cross charge of machine resources

poletto wrote:
> 
> The easiest approach (having number of users per business area as
> rationale) seems unfair for me. How do you guys handle this?
> 
A different approach to charging departments for consumption would be to
'rent' them a fixed amount of resources.  It takes some work to set up,
but it can then be used to justify additional growth in disk and CPU.

Department x wants to start storing additional information, 'rent' them
a ASP that's all their own.  Their budget pays for the additional
drives.  Department Y has a new piece of software that is CPU intensive,
'rent' them their own fixed memory pool.  Another department wants some
new software written, hire out your programming staff by the hour, etc.

This also helps to allocate resources so that one departments end of day
job doesn't bring the system to it's knees affecting all other
departments.  The offending department is restricted in resource
consumption.

This also provides each department with greater predictability of run
times which allows them to schedule their resources.  If a job in their
department runs in 20 minutes one day, but 45 the next because of some
other departments processing, it creates dissatisfaction with the DP
department.

Now this doesn't have to get into a bidding war between departments or
place the IT manager as the keeper of the keys, but it does force all
departments to recognise that the system is a shared resource and that
sharing is a good thing.

Once a schedule of need is estabolished, turn off auto tuning and have a
background job allocate memory pools based upon a time of day, day of
week, day of month basis.

This approach gives the departments the benefit of a fixed charge that
they can work with as opposed to a 'surprise' charge each month.  Sort
of like when AOL charged by the minute instead of a flat fee.

Just another way of looking at it....
-- 
===================================================
James W. Kilgore   | Progressive Data Systems, Inc.
President          | 311 31st Ave SE
(206) 848-2567     | Puyallup, Washington 98374 USA
qappdsn@ibm.net    | http://www.ultimate.org/PDS
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