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May 26th, 2014 07:00
Do you (and how do you) charge for backups
We made a portal in company which can be used as excel source and gives exact data amount to be backed up. What they do after is more politics so I do not get involved, but I was wondering how do you change backups? Until now cost of backups was hidden in hosting in my case. I had a quick thought about it and here is the headache.
In the distant days of tapes, it was simple - you backup 100TB and you charge 100TB back. Of course, tape is cheap and you cheat a bit due to compression, but you could never really know how much since all data more or less shared same pool. Then VTL came, but story remained pretty much the same.
With de-dupe, I guess this is a bit different because it is no longer compression which helps you, but dedupe as well. At the end of the day, you still charge what you protect - your native value at the source. However, with boom of internal departments and customers, I have seen granularity that needed to be achieved so each SQL DB has its own DB group (they do share TLOG group) and so on to be able to provide more exact data. I have recently seen some people trying to charge only how much is stored on de-dupe appliance to get cheaper service - is this what you do too? I'm not quite sure this is where I wish to go (I surely do not want to). So, I guess I would like to hear what model do you use and what pros/cons have you seen in your environment.
bingo.1
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May 27th, 2014 05:00
FYI, it is a 3-step process:
- Get the list of your failes SS
- Enter them in the Group - Properties windows as shown
- Restart the group from the GUI as usual.
Honestly ... I prefer to use the command line ;-)
crazyrov
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May 26th, 2014 07:00
We use DPA and manual reports (from the NMC) to bill the customers. The billing is based on the volume of data protected irrespective of where the data is stored.
Anyways this is not the only charge put to the customer, there are n number of there charges for the miscellaneous tasks that we provide.
ble1
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May 26th, 2014 11:00
I did use NMC couple of times in distant past, but numbers there would never match mminfo and just as DPA I would always have some unfinished groups in reports which was not true so it didn't bring any confidence. DPA was also ruled out as its collection back in a day was a little bit too aggressive (I heard in v6 whole engine was redesigned, but it's too late now).
crazyrov
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May 27th, 2014 01:00
We have a lot dependent on the DPA, as a matter of fact we have a separate team that manages reports on DPA.
bingo.1
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May 27th, 2014 01:00
We have calculated a flat rate per GB depending on our environment and change per client amount of data.
To gather the right numbers, i solely rely on NW's media index. This avoids potential trouble with other tools by default ;-) .
How do i get the numbers? - I generate a mminfo report of all save sets from the last month and store it as a CSV. Then i detect all current clients and summarize their save set sizes per client. I have automated this process.
The only issue is that the amount to backup the CFIs is charged to the NW server of course. If needed, you should correct that by adjusting the fixum appropriately.
ble1
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May 27th, 2014 03:00
Hi bingo,
indices itself are part of backup server so it makes sense to charge yourself
But overall those are tiny compared to data volume from client so they can easily be ignored. I wonder how folks who use dedupe or compression on host side are handling this. I do not have such case (well, we use compression in Oracle, but this does not affect data volume as it is exact as DB size), but with win2k12 offering dedupe and some other products on the way I guess things might change. Further, if you use snapshots do you calculate those snapshots as well? At the moment we don't - all snaps I do with PowerSnap are not visible as such mdb (you only have tiny save sets for snap, but they do not say anything about real size of the snapshot volume).
bingo.1
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May 27th, 2014 04:00
Yup - IMHO EMC could improve the user acceptance by just documenting not only the 'big new features' but also the tiny but important improvents ... at the time they are released.
I just learned that once again when it came to 'restarting the scheduled backup of a single save set from the GUI'.
It has been mentioned as the first new feature in the NW 8.1 Release Notes as follows:
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Failed save sets can be restarted without running the entire savegroup again. You can initiate a restart from the NetWorker Management Console (NMC), the nsradmin command line utility, or from the savegrp program. In the NetWorker Management Console, select Restart in the Group Details dialog, and then select the individual save sets that you want to restart.
--------------------------
And that was it. Besides the fact that the whole procedure is wrong (when will the writers finally use NW, verify the procedures and use the correct terminology?) there was no further statement in neither the Admin Guide nor in the Command Line Reference. I needed to open an SR for clarification.
But how do they expect something to be used which is unknown to the user?
bingo.1
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May 27th, 2014 04:00
Hi Hrojve,
you are right - Avamar backups and snapshots are treated differently. And of course Windows 2012 dedupe could also be an issue. Right now, we are not using any of those.
To get VBA backup sizes you could run
mminfo -k -q vmname= -r vmname,ssid,sumflags,ssflags,savetime,totalsize
Of course all save sets will have the same size (a 'full' snap).
BTW - to the best of my knowledge, the 'new data' for VDA backups is obviously stored in the media index but the only way to get to it using mminfo would be to use '-S' ... for each save set separately. This is not admin friendly at all :-(
ble1
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May 27th, 2014 04:00
I was not aware of -k, but I see this is new in 8.1.x and for VBA (which I also do not use yet), but it seems to be solution for those kind of backups.
ble1
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May 27th, 2014 05:00
Agreed
ble1
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May 27th, 2014 05:00
I have seen that in release notes and it also didn't make much sense to me as I could restart it before. It seems only they added feature that you can select which ones to restart now - quick browse through savegrp manual doesn't show how really.
Thierry101
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June 8th, 2014 19:00
charging based on raw as you mentioned....charging by de-dupe is nightmare. There is no out of box report precisely says how much being backed up on daily/weekly basis unless you do alot of CLI/excel processing etc etc.
Furthermore, customer will just say how long they want to keep/retention. Where you keep it up to you and the way you going to calculate with its number of copies another messy formula.
Small co may say charge what you keep after de-dupe BUT customers will always question how you come up with number and please explain the maths. If you cant prove due to lack of tools or methods and been charging rounding to nearest number or average etc then you lose your trust. Rework.Kinda loop. And payment always delayed.