Billing Charge Back Report

This report calculates the charges associated with the primary and secondary storage entities in the CommNet domain, within a specified time range and length of time. From these calculations, for example, you can determine the charge of protecting the data of a department in your company.

Secondary storage calculations are based on the Activity Qualifier Window for a CommCell. Primary storage calculations for SRM components in CommCell are based on the time range and length of time specified on the local time of the CommNet Server. For CommCell specific information, regardless of what is set in the Cell Configuration dialog box, this report always considers weekend days as separate days.

The Billing Detail Report can be generated through the Charge Back report and displays, for a particular cell or client, a detailed view of the charges. This report is derived by clicking on the Number of DP operations, total price, Data size, or the Price for data protection or price for storage.

Costing Methods

The report calculates charges based on fixed or category costing methods.

Fixed Costing

Fixed costing allows you to generate the report based on a fixed storage price. Note the following:

• Is based on fixed parameters set from the General tab of the Cell Configuration dialog box.
  • For primary storage, it is based on the parameters set in the Price per MB/GB/TB/PB of Data field.
  • For secondary storage, it is based on the parameters set in the Price Per Data Protection and Price Per MB/GB/TB/PB of Data fields.
• For each storage option, you can temporarily set a new price for each of these parameters from the Override Configured Price section of the filter before generating the report. Such a change will not affect the settings in the Cell Configuration dialog box.

Category Costing

Category costing generates the report based on pricing for primary or secondary storage entities. The costs for these storage entities are defined in the Cost Category dialog box. When you select Category Costing as costing method, you may specify one of the following for costing:

• Drive Type
• Media Type

Client or Billable Entity Selection

You can generate the report for a particular client in a CommCell. You can also generate the report based on a billable entity, which can include multiple clients, such as clients within a department in your organization.

Regardless of client or billable entity:

• You can include charges for primary and/or secondary storage.
• Completed jobs are charged for the day they are started, regardless of the time and day for which they are completed.
• The cost categories and billing departments that are associated with a job at the job's completion are used to calculate the charges for the job.
• For secondary storage:
  • You can include or exclude data from uninstalled clients. Including these clients in the report calculations ensures that the data will still be charged, because they have already stored and/or have used storage resources in data protection operations. (Note that this report will not include the data from SRM components in a CommCell.)
  • You can include or exclude pruned/tombstoned data. Including pruned/tombstoned data protection operations ensures that pruned/tombstoned data protection operations will still be charged because these operations have also used storage resources.
  • You can include or exclude savings due to deduplication in the cost calculations. When Consider Deduplication Savings option is selected, the cost calculations are based on the Data on Media (the size of the data stored on the media after deduplication). Otherwise, the cost calculations are based on the Application size (the size of the application data that was backed up).
  • All copies used for data protection operations will be charged. If a data protection operation residing on a primary copy is then copied to a secondary copy, the protected data is counted twice. (For inline auxiliary copies, the number of the DP operations will be counted once although storage price will be counted twice.) If the copies use different cost categories, the data protection operation will be charged according to the cost category associated with the storage resource used by each copy.
  • Synthetic full operations are charged.
  • Incomplete operations (stopped, pending, running, waiting), killed, or failed operations are not charged.
  • Express Recovery Backups are not charged.
  • Snap Vault data protection operations are not charged.
  • Calculates the cost of protecting the data of subclient even after that subclient is deleted.
  • Quick Recovery volumes are charged for the total data amount in gigabytes for the day, no matter how many times a snapshot was taken of that volume in that day.
  • For single instance disk libraries, charges will be calculated based on the total job data size. Hence, even if a single instance hardware does not write all of the job data to the disk, the job, since it attempted to write the data to the disk, will be charged with the total data size. For example, on a single instancing library, if you do a data protection operation of 100 GB. and out of which only 10 GB of data is written by the hardware (since it is a single instance hardware), the software will calculate a charge back amount on the entire 100 GB.
  • For data secured using SnapVault, there is no way to determine the actual size of the data. Hence, the Charge Back report will not charge or consider SnapVault data.
  • The billing/costing for replication pairs assigned to billable entities is not counted on the report.
• For primary storage:
  • An SRM Agent for Windows File System must first be installed in a CommCell before cost categories can be assigned to primary storage resources. However, the SRM Agent for Windows File System does not have to be installed for cost categories to be assigned to NAS volumes.
  • When cost categories for Oracle are assigned, the appropriate SRM Agent for Windows File System or the SRM Windows File System Agent must first be installed on the Oracle Server.
  • When cost categories are assigned for the SRM Agent for Unix File System or SRM Unix File System Agent , it is recommended that these cost categories are assigned to logical volumes in the the CommCell console, not to disks.
  • When a subclient is deleted from SRM or SRM component in CommCell, it will not be included on the Charge Back report because the history for the subclient has been deleted from SRM or CommCell, and is no longer available.
  • When this report is run against an SRM Exchange client, it will be based on the configured subclients for primary storage.

Client Based Report

If the report is generated by client, the following sections are displayed in the report:

Summary for All Selected Cells

• Cost Categories Aggregate table lists the cost categories, the total price for that cost category, a ranking of how expensive that cost category is in relation to the others, and the total price to store data on the associated storage entity type of that cost category.
• The Cells Aggregate table lists the cells in the CommNet domain, the cell type (if it is a CommCell), the total price of that cell, how expensive that cell is, the number of data protection operations performed, the price for each data protection operation, and the total data size.
• The Clients Aggregate table lists the name of the client, the client's a CommCell name, that client's ranking in terms of how expensive that client is, the number of data protection operations performed for that client (if that client is part of a CommCell), the total data size of the client, and the total cost of that client.

<n> CommCell

• The Cost Categories Aggregate table lists the same information, but for a particular client.
• The Cell Information table includes granular information for that client, including information about subclients for secondary storage and volumes for primary storage.

Billable Entity Based Report

If the report is generated by billable entity, the following sections are displayed in the report:

Summary for All Selected Cells

• The Cost Categories Aggregate table lists each cost category, the total price for each category, and how that cost category ranks in terms of relative expense as per the other cost categories that are configured.
• The Billable Entity Aggregate table lists each billable entity defined in the CommNet domain, along with the charge for each entity, how expensive that entity is in relation to other billable entities, the number of data protection operations for each entity (if that entity represents a CommCell object), average price per data protection operation, the size of all the data within the entity, and the total cost for the entity.

<Billable Entity Name>

• The Cost Categories Aggregate table lists the same information, but for a particular billable entity.
• The Billable Entity Information table includes specific information about the billable entity, such as the number of data protection operations or the data size of the entire entity.

NOTE

• For reporting purposes, the Data Size field value is a rounded number, and may not reflect the actual storage data size. However, that actual size can be displayed if users hover over the data size values. The calculations for determining the cost of storage will use the actual data size value. The Price for Storage field value represents the actual cost and is calculated using the actual storage data size.

  For Virtual Server iDataAgent jobs that were suspended or resumed, the actual storage data size will reflect the larger value in the Data Size field. Thus, the Price for Storage field value will represent a higher cost of storage than was actually used.

• Cost categories associated with an SRM Exchange subclient only calculates the data size information from the Exchange mailboxes and public folders; calculations do not include the transaction logs. In previous releases, cost categories were associated with the storage groups where the transaction logs were calculated in the total space occupied. Therefore, take note that calculations for Billing Charge Back reports would differ for the upgraded clients.

Keywords: Cost Report