Designing IT chargeback models for Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP

Most organizations closely track their spending to ensure that their resources are being used efficiently. Tracking how much different business units are spending provides crucial insights into the efficacy of certain types of spending to an organizations goals or bottom line. An IT chargeback system assigns the costs of services to the business units or individuals that use them.

Customers and Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) using Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP are frequently required to implement chargeback mechanisms to perform cost allocation. In this post, I outline multiple approaches to implement chargeback by using AWS and FSx for ONTAP features and tools. I describe AWS Cost Allocation tags, AWS Cost Explorer, ONTAP quota report, and ONTAP Quality of Service (QoS) as methods to design chargeback solutions. With the chargeback mechanisms described in this post, you can ensure that resources are used efficiently, align costs with the value of services, and allow technology to be more responsive to business needs.

Background

An IT chargeback strategy identifies the costs of IT resources relative to the individuals or business units that use them. A chargeback strategy in FSx for ONTAP allows companies to identify storage costs and usage in several reporting dimensions that align with their financial accountability. By implementing a chargeback strategy, companies can charge their user base, business units, and external customers for the costs associated to the FSx for ONTAP resources utilized. Chargebacks optimize costs by creating a culture of financial responsibility, increase visibility to resource usage, and improve accounting management and budgeting.

FSx for ONTAP is a storage service that allow customers to launch and run fully managed ONTAP file systems in the cloud. It provides highly reliable, scalable, performant, and feature-rich file storage built on NetApp ONTAP. FSx for ONTAP has built-in optimization features that allow customers to substantially reduce costs: automatic tiering, deduplication, compression, and compaction can be used to significantly improve storage efficiency.

AWS Cost Allocation Tags and AWS Cost Explorer provide resource-level cost reports for FSx for ONTAP file systems and the backups of their volumes. FSx for ONTAP quota reports provide you detailed storage usage information on a group and user level. QoS policies allow you to control and monitor performance of shared resources in this environment.

AWS Cost Allocation Tags work best if your file system is dedicated to a business unit or department because they provide consolidated information on a file system or backup level. However, if you are sharing file system resources among business units or departments, you should consider using quota reports or QoS since they provide more granular information and report on other infrastructure components.

Structuring Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP resources

FSx for ONTAP has four main resources that we use in our chargeback strategy:

File System: the infrastructure and FSx for ONTAP software that hosts your data
Storage Virtual Machine (SVM): virtual file servers that serve data on your network
Volumes: data containers for your files and directories
Backups: offline copy of a volume

You can break down your design in file systems, SVMs, and volumes according to your financial reporting dimensions and organizational structure. Use this practice to simplify your chargeback model.

For example, a school district has three file systems called high, middle, and elementary. On each file system, you would have SVMs for each school in the Independent School District (ISD). On each SVM, you have volumes for each school department that you backup.

Figure 1: Shows a table of file systems, SVMs, and volumes, which map to different high, middle, and elementary schools, and facilities within.

Figure 1: FSx for ONTAP resource structure example

Walkthrough

Now I will walk through how you can implement IT cost allocation. I first discuss how you can use AWS Cost Allocation tags to organize resource costs on the cost allocation report. After that, I discuss using AWS Cost Explorer to view and analyze the costs. I will also use FSx for ONTAP storage quotas reports for a more granular view of storage utilization. Following that, I discuss Storage Quality of Service (QoS), an additional mechanism in the chargeback strategy. Finally, I explain the two different approaches you can use to collect the reports: used capacity or provisioned capacity.

AWS Cost Allocation tags

A tag is a label that you assign to an AWS resource. Each tag consists of a key and a value. You can tag your FSx for ONTAP file systems and their backups. You can apply tags that represent business categories (e.g., cost centers, application names, or owners) to organize your costs across FSx for ONTAP. AWS uses cost allocation tags to organize your resource costs on your cost allocation report, which makes it easier for you to categorize and track your AWS costs.

In the following screenshot, you can see tags assigned to our example school district’s high school file system.

Shows tags added under the file system details page in the Amazon FSx console.

Figure 2: Tags assigned to the FSx for ONTAP-HIGH file system

To use a tag for cost allocation purposes, you need to activate it on AWS Billing. After you activate your tags on AWS Billing, they appear on the Billing and Cost Management console, where you can track the costs associated with each resource. AWS generates a cost allocation report with your usage and costs grouped by your active tags. We recommend tagging all resources and align cost allocation tags to your financial reporting dimensions.

AWS Cost Explorer

The following AWS Cost Explorer report shows my aggregated FSx for ONTAP costs in a single day. By default, you see a consolidated view if filtering by service.

Figure 3: Shows daily aggregated costs for entire file system in a chart.

Figure 3: Daily aggregated FSx for ONTAP cost

In the next example, I assigned the values FSxN-HIGH, FSxN-MIDDLE, and FSxN-ELEMENTARY to the Name tag key of the respective file systems and activated them on AWS Billing.

Next, I filter the AWS Cost Explorer report using the tag key Name and the file systems tag values to get their individual costs.

Figure 4: Using Cost Explorer, select the Group By then select Tag name to get the individual costs of each volume.

Figure 4: Cost Explorer report filtered by tags in the FSx NetApp ONTAP file systems

In the following diagram, I use the tags assigned to the backup of the volumes in the file systems to report on their costs.

Figure 5: Using the Cost Explorer, a cost breakdown for each volume is shown based on using tags.

Figure 5: Cost Explorer report filtered by tags on the FSx for ONTAP volume backups

FSx for ONTAP storage quotas report

You can use quota reports for a more granular view of storage utilization. The quota report can be an important tool in your chargeback strategy that allows you to track storage on a user level. You can see file and storage utilization per user on each volume.

In our example, I use the CLI to setup quota reporting, but you can also use the ONTAP REST API to configure quotas. Note that the quota command on FSx for ONTAP CLI provides a rich set of options that allow a deeper level of disk space management (including restricting disk space use). We are focusing on reporting for the purpose of this post.

In the following example, I use the FSx for ONTAP CLI to create a quota policy for a SVM and associate it to a volume. The steps to complete this task are here:

1. Create the new quota policy:

volume quota policy create -vserver FSxN-ELEMENTARY-SVM-WINTERVIEW -policy-name qp_ELEMENTARY-SVM-WINTERVIEW_1

2. Assign the new quota policy to the SVM

vserver modify -vserver FSxN-ELEMENTARY-SVM-WINTERVIEW -quota-policy qp_ELEMENTARY-SVM-WINTERVIEW_1

3. Associate the policy to the volume

volume quota policy rule create -vserver FSxN-ELEMENTARY-SVM-WINTERVIEW -policy-name qp_ELEMENTARY-SVM-WINTERVIEW_1 -volume FSxN_ELEMENTARY_SVM_WINTERVIEW_VOL_SCIENCES -type user -target "" -qtree ""

4. Initialize the quotas

volume quota on -vserver FSxN-ELEMENTARY-SVM-WINTERVIEW -volume FSxN_ELEMENTARY_SVM_WINTERVIEW_VOL_SCIENCES -foreground

I run a quota report that shows the disk space utilization per user. In the report shown in the following diagram, you see details about the storage SVM FSxN-ELEMENTARY-SVM-WINTERVIEW used by the sciences department.

You see that the Linux user ID 1009 has 161 files on volume FSxN_ELEMENTARY_SVM_WINTERVIEW_VOL_SCIENCES totaling 804.2 GB. User ID 1010 has 60 files in the same volume with a total of 237.6 GB.

Figure 6: Using volume quota report command, the quota report for linux users is shown for each volume and user

Figure 6: FSx for ONTAP quota report for Linux users

You can see a similar report on the usage from Windows users bill and brian authenticated via the Active Directory domain example on volume FSxN_HIGH_SVM_EAST_VOL_SCIENCES.

Figure 7: using volume quota report, the quota for each volume and Active Directory user is shown accordingly

Figure 7: FSx for ONTAP quota report for Active Directory users

Storage Quality of Service (QoS)

In some environments, file systems or SVMs, are shared between business units or departments. QoS can be an additional mechanism in the chargeback strategy.

QoS allows you to control and monitor performance of shared resources in a FSx for ONTAP environment. You can design service level of agreements (SLAs) for users and applications, reduce the risk of workloads consuming more resources than intended, and improve the end-user experience and application uptime.

You can use QoS to setup minimum (floor) and maximum (ceiling) input/output operations per second (IOPS) and throughput for resources (e.g., SVMs and volumes). By setting a maximum throughput level on a volume, you avoid the workload jeopardizing other resources in the infrastructure. By setting a QoS floor on a resource, you ensure each workload has the minimum required resources to run efficiently.

In another approach, you use QoS to assign different levels of IOPS and throughput to volumes. Having that, you can associate the volumes to different tier levels (e.g., Gold, Silver, and Bronze). Each of the tiers can have a different cost model. By using the tiering approach in combination with volume capacity, you break down the costs of a shared file system at a volume level and use it for chargeback.

Used capacity or provisioned capacity

Another aspect to consider is whether to charge on used capacity or provisioned capacity. Each customer and ISV have their own approach. Nonetheless, you can collect reports on each case to implement your chargeback plan.

In the following example, the CLI shows that volume FSxN_HIGH_SVM_EAST_VOL_SCIENCES has a total size of 950 GB, with only 159.9 GB used.

Figure 8: Shows total capacity of 950GB and used capacity of 159.9GB from the volume show command.

Figure 8: Used capacity or provisioned capacity

Cleaning up

If you followed along and would like to remove resources used in this solution to avoid incurring any unwanted future charges, you can delete the FSx for ONTAP file system by following the Clean up resources section of the FSx for ONTAP user guide.

Conclusion

In this post, I showed you how to use FSx for ONTAP resources, AWS Tags, ONTAP quota reports, and ONTAP QoS as mechanisms to implement an IT chargeback strategy.

You can use chargeback to assign the costs of services to business units or individuals that use them. Chargeback can help you effectively manage resources, align costs with the value of services, and make informed decisions about how to allocate budget.

If you need any further assistance, contact your AWS account team. To learn more about FSx for ONTAP, you can check the product documentation.

Thanks for reading this blog post! If you have any comments or questions, leave them in the comments section.

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