So you can't just take word of the customer? "No, you can't," Raftery says. "The customer would have a difference of opinion about what was utilized."
Ah. Well, then, technology to the rescue. As part of OpenScale, an application called InfoLease, run on the customer's servers, allows EMC to monitor the entire storage infrastructure -- including storage capacity in Symmetrix or Clariion storage systems; Celerra NAS systems; Connetrix SAN switches; and storage software, including TimeFinder and SRDF (Symmetrix Replication Data Facility). InfoLease periodically connects back to EMC's headquarters and reports on exactly how many terabytes were used, how many Fibre Channel ports were turned on, and so on. Anticipating that some customers may be uncomfortable with this idea, however, EMC adds it has "no visibility into the customer data."
Other storage systems vendors, including Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ) and IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM), offer similar storage-on-demand programs. But EMC says it has the only fully automated billing infrastructure in the industry, eliminating the guesswork [ed. note: and keeping its customers honest].
The program is currently priced based on how much storage a customer uses per month within preset tiers. For now, OpenScale pricing is negotiated on a per-customer basis; Raftery says EMC expects to have standardized pricing by the end of 2003.
One customer using the OpenScale program is Deloitte Consulting. Eric Eriksen, the firm's CTO, says about three months ago EMC wheeled a Symmetrix 8830 -- fully loaded with around 70 Tbytes -- into Deloitte's Philadelphia data center. But since it leased the Symm under the OpenScale program, it's only paying for the small amount of disk it's currently using.
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