Understanding Your CIT Invoice: Chargeback

Data Center chargeback is an area that seems to elicit considerable discussion. This article describes some of the methodology used to charge customers for CIT services and explains how to use the reporting tools available in Web Sponsor to "drill down" into the chargeback data. Using these reporting tools allows customers to better isolate how the charges are being generated.

The rate group

When the consolidated invoice was designed in 2003, it was decided, for readability, that all monthly invoices generated would list charges by rate group.

A rate group is a CIT chargeable service composed of one or more chargeable entities. A rate group such as Video Services has several chargeable entities: video casting, web collaboration, video bridge, and AV room design. The Titan Batch Processing rate group includes prime time CPU time, discount period CPU time, and number of I/Os for all batch jobs submitted by an account for a particular billing period. Many rate groups, such as Oracle Licenses, have just one chargeable entity and are directly billable.

There are over 200 available rate groups. Most customers only see a much smaller subset of these rate group charges. The key concept is that all production invoices in Web Sponsor summarize charges for accounts at the rate group level.

The invoice

CIT invoices are generated on the 19th of each month. All rate group charges generated for a CIT account from the 19th of the previous month to the 18th day of the current month are aggregated and presented as a 1 to 2 page invoice that generally follows the format shown on the next page.

In our example invoice, a sample account is invoiced $63,128.84 for Batch Processing on Titan based on all jobs submitted by users of this account for the month of August. This account was also invoiced $398,173.07 for Titan Disk Storage based on files managed by users for this account.

Billing reports

To dig a bit further, customers can select "Detailed Billing Reports" in Web Sponsor (see the box below) to display charging data at a more granular level—either for an entire account or a specific userid assigned to the account:

Selecting "Detailed Billing Reports," account sponsors can:

1. Produce a detailed account invoice that shows charges by each chargeable entity within a rate group—either for each userid in an account or for a single user; OR

2. Select a second option to list all transactions (Batch jobs, TSO sessions, DB2 charges, etc.) submitted for all users of the account or a single user; OR

3. Show detailed Titan disk storage charges generated for an account or userid for a billing period.

These reports can be generated online for the current billing period-to-date or for any previous billing period. Because of the amount of data to be retrieved, generation of these reports can take several minutes to run. Customers who choose these reporting options are assessed a small batch processing charge to retrieve the data.

The following shows what a detailed invoice for our example account might look like, where all rate group charges for the account are listed.

More detailed reporting is available. By selecting the option to list all detailed charges you can list all Titan transactions for the billing period for an account or userid—including Batch jobs, TSO sessions, Shadow charges, Model204 charges, and Print charges.

Finally, to examine disk storage charges in more detail, select either "Month-to-Date DASD report" or "Prior Month DASD report" option to generate a report showing managed storage consumption by userid by level of storage for the requested billing period. Each data set belonging to a userid for the account is multiplied by the number of days in the month that the data set existed to get the total “megabyte-days” for the data set. The report then totals all megabyte-days for all data sets allocated to each userid in an account.

Data set storage

Titan places disk data on the most efficient media, based on size and usage history. New and actively used data sets reside on primary "Level 0" disk volumes. Less frequently accessed data sets are first moved onto secondary "Level 1" disk volumes and then to "Level 2" tape storage. Titan automatically tracks where each data set resides, moving ("migrating") data sets off primary volumes as space is needed and automatically “recalling” them as they are accessed. The report separates storage usage by Level 0, Level 1, Level 2, and Backup Storage.

====================================================================================================
2008/08/19-2008/09/18  DASD  Charges FOR ACCOUNT XXXX  Run Date - 2008/09/25
                                XXXX Cost Report                    

	  Lev 0     Lev 0     Backup    Backup   Lev 1      Lev 1    Lev 2     Lev 2       Total 
Userid     MB       Cost       MB       Cost      MB        Cost      MB       Cost        Cost 

User1	  829.88     $8.55   517.93     $.16     .16	   $0.00    247.93    $2.55       $11.26
User2 257,617.89 $2,653.46 2,543,521.38 $763.06  .81       $0.01 103,103.02   $1,061.96   $4,478.49
User3  16,244.38   $167.32 1,028,964.77 $308.69 3,970.89   $40.90 615,961.78  $6,344.41   $6,861.32

Totals…..

     274,692.15 $2,829.33 3,573,004.08 $1,071.91 3,971.86  $40.91  719312.73   $7408.92   $11,351.07   	
====================================================================================================

Backup versions of Titan data sets are retained for a 42-day grace period after the data set has been deleted. This means that an account or userid may still be charged for storage for up to 42 days after all online data sets for that userid have been deleted.

Questions?

If you need help interpreting the billing reports or have suggestions for new reports, please call the NIH Help Desk (http://ithelpdesk.nih.gov/support) at 301-496-4357, 301-496-8294 (TTY) or toll free at 866-319-4357. We will be more than happy to help or discuss new reporting options for chargeback.