HP Storage Essentials Chargeback Manager -
Overview & Features

Overview

HP Chargeback Manager extends HP Storage Essentials Suite with asset management and accounting capabilities that enable you to associate storage infrastructure costs with business initiatives. Whether you are a service provider offering storage services to external customers, or an internal IT organization building a tiered storage utility for your lines of business, HP Chargeback Manager accelerates and error-proofs your ability to meter utilization, control storage costs, increase revenue, and differentiate your service offering to better meet customer demands.

HP Chargeback Manager leverages the HP family's unified database of application, host, fabric switch, and storage system connectivity information to offer two options for managing the costs of storage services. Asset-Based Chargeback calculates costs based on a department's ownership percentage and depreciated value of its assigned storage assets. Storage-based Chargeback calculates costs based on the actual amount of storage used by each business application, the tier of storage it is using, and a department's asset ownership percentage. You can also leverage the pre-defined and custom asset records and reports to centrally manage the cradle-to-grave lifecycle of your storage assets.

Features

• Calculates chargeback values based on departmental ownership percentages and the depreciated value of storage assets

Limits and enforces choices at each step along the provisioning path:

• Calculates chargeback values based on the actual amount of storage used by a business application on a storage system, the tier of storage being used, and the ownership percentage assigned to each department

• Create unlimited number of departments
• Assign percentage ownership of systems applications, servers, switches, and storage

• Optional "tax" accounts for power, floor space, data backup, and other ancillary cost items
• Applied once each month on top of standard ownership costs for both the storage-based and asset-based chargeback models

• Define storage tiers and associated costs to account for the fact that "all storage is not equal"
• Assign storage systems to different tiers
• Tiers used by HP Provisioning Manager to ensure that capacity is correctly allocated

• Detailed asset records for full storage supply chain, including applications, hosts, fabric switches, and storage systems
• Staff, geographic, license and warranty, and custom fields track complete asset information, including date installed, date modified, status (e.g. new,missing), vendor, model, serial number, barcode, administrative contact information, location, and more

• New asset-based Chargeback reports include department names, asset names, ownership ratios, chargeback amounts, infrastructure tax, and total asset-based costs per month
• New storage-based Chargeback reports include department names, applications, ownership ratios, total capacities, capacities used, and monthly infrastructure tax
• New asset reports include asset count summary, assets by department, enterprise-wide asset summary, storage system assets
• Tiered Storage reports display storage-based asset and chargeback information by tier

• Export reports to HTML, PDF, XML, CSV, Microsoft Excel

• Schedule reports for automatic e-mail delivery to individuals or mailing lists

• Leverages integrated, fine-grained access control features of Storage Essentials product family to restrict access to chargeback calculations and data and asset records