ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how to implement a strategy to recover costs across linked networks and how to communicate to senior management that the data center is more than a service bureau — it can be a profit center, as well. Data centers provide services to a business enterprise that are recovered by a cost allocation system that distributes these costs to customer business units. The chargeable resource categories must be easily understood by the customers who are to be billed and must be measurable by use statistics that can be readily accumulated for the review of customers in their billing statement. The chargeable resources for enterprisewide network cost allocation can absorb some of the data center resources, as well as the resources required for the network. The most important network resource categories are: cable, linkages, workstations, and so on. The manner of rate determination is directly determined by the network resource allocation strategy and chargeback system cost-control objectives.
