Remember chargebacks? It’s the practice of tracking how much
bandwidth, CPU time, disk storage or other expensive IT stuff a specific employee
or business unit is using, and then charging them for what they used. The idea
is that if people have to pay for what they use, they’ll use less of it.
Great idea, except it gets so complicated and cumbersome that very few IT organizations I talk to these days bother with it. Half the time, they don’t even know how many virtual machines they’re running or how much disk space they have, much less who’s using them or how the heck to charge them for it. Then there’s the monumental hassle of getting agreement on chargeback formulas, as well as all the paperwork required to issue and pay the bills. It doesn’t quite make sense, especially in a recession, when you remember you’re only talking about “funny money” – shifting pocket change from one pocket of the corporate pants into another, rather than spending your time getting more money from customers.
But how about if you could just show people how many IT resources they were wasting, holding them up to public ridicule – or at least pressure from their bosses – to hold down their ravenous appetites? That’s how some customers are using Hyper9’s Virtualization Optimization Suite, according to the company’s Director of Product Management Jonathan Reeve. It’s called “showback,” he says, when the offender is just shown the error of their ways – say, a report listing all the VMs they created to test a new application and never shut down, leaving them to eat up power, CPU cycles and disk space. “Shameback” is – well, when the conversation gets more pointed. If Sigmund Freud were a data center manager, he would have figured this out long ago.
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