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Placing a Dollar Value on System Usage?

Posted by Cliff on from the estimating-costs-and-padding-fees dept.

Anonymous SysAdmin asks: "I wonder how do system admins put a dollar value on system resources? Nowadays we see many hosting providers calculating and summing system utilization like IO operations, processor usage, bandwidth, and RAM into the monthly charges (here's an example). How can they process this info and most importantly how can they put a dollar value on it? What are the common practices in the industry and what are the tools used?"

2 of 26 comments (clear)

  1. "Nowadays"? by Kris_J · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This is how business computing started. My mother used to be software support for UCC in England -- they had huge mainframes dotted around the globe and they billed by the minute (obviously easier pre-multithreading). There should be heaps of resources dating back more than 30 years on how to do this sort of thing. Heard of a library?

  2. We did it this way: by MacEnvy · · Score: 2, Interesting

    My boss asked me to do this not long ago ... We took several factors into our calculation at my corporation. We were doing it on a server by server basis, so keep that into mind.

    1) Cost of server hardware as a function of the time it would be in use
    2) Cost of server OS (Window 2000 Server) over same time and over users
    3) Cost of bandwidth used (fraction of total bandwidth)
    4) Cost of maintaining server (personnel, electricity, hazard prevention, security, upgrades, general analysis tools)
    5) How important the server was to the overall network infrastructure (objective, as in the DHCP server is worth+)

    Obviously, the equation will be different for every server and every organization, but that's a general overview.

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