Methods for Charging for IT Services

A recent article on CIO Magazine titled "How to Make IT Allocations Work" reminded me of a model I proposed for the university for which I worked. At the university, a state public school, data storage space was in constant demand. As we had built up the technology infrastructure we implemented a fast, highly accessible SAN. Originally we set it up without quotas (because, at the time, Windows only allocated quotas by user name, not partition). We found that the space was being eaten up quickly by departments and users putting their personal data on the space (lots of photos and MP3 files). A few months after installed we added quota management software and notified users of the quotas and that worked well. We did anticipate and receive requests for larger space, in the neighborhood of TB increments. As it turned out, most of these needs were not for the frequently accessed, mission critical data but more for research data--large images and data sets that needed to be network accessible but not necessarily by several people simultaneously or backed up with the same frequency. To do this on our tier 1 storage systems would have been cost-prohibitive and previously departments were often operating their own home-grown Linux servers that weren't being patched or maintained with any regularity.

It was at a vendor presentation that I came up with a viable solution. I was at Apple's headquarters in Cupertino and the presentations included one on server hardware. While they were presenting a combined Apple Server with their disk storage array, it gave me the idea to use their storage array (14 drives in 2U) and use the fiber connect to go to a Windows NAS-head. It was the least expensive enterprise-worthy but Windows native solution.

With that said, I proposed a lease model for allocating space to the departments who wanted it. Under the proposal we would buy the equipment from the IT budget and then carve out TB slices for the departments who wanted space and charge them a monthly rate based on a 3 or 4 year cost of the equipment and related expenditures. It really worked out to be quite elegant but unfortunately other state auditing guidelines said that if we had the equipment we shouldn't charge for the use of it. The point that the state guidelines fail to realize is that we could expand and provide service. There were some workarounds so were finally able to implement but not with the elegance of a monthly fee for the service but that would have been my preference nonetheless.