Cost Accounting for Shared IT Infrastructures

Distributed client/server architectures are the technological backbone of today's data centres. A usage-based allocation of infrastructure costs to business processes or users is often not possible as the necessary resource consumption measurements incur too much overhead.

Reinhard Brandl proposes a method to derive estimates for the expected resource consumption of customer-oriented services during standard load tests. This facilitates the determination of usage-based cost allocation keys significantly. He implements the concept in a software tool kit and evaluates it successfully in a set of experiments with multi-tier database applications. In particular, he uses the determined consumption estimates as input parameters for Queuing Network Models which lead to highly accurate performance predictions. Finally, he analyzes how the method can be integrated into existing IT processes at the BMW Group.

Autorentext
Dr. Reinhard Brandl promovierte bei Prof. Dr. Martin Bichler am Lehrstuhl für Internetbasierte Geschäftssysteme der Technischen Universität München. Während seiner Promotion war er als Doktorand am Kompetenzzentrum IT-Architekturen der BMW Group tätig.

Inhalt
IT Infrastructure Cost Allocation.- Cost Allocation based on Resource Profiles.- Experiments: Resource profiles.- Experiments: Analytical Models.- Proof of Concept: BMW Group.- Conclusions.