Four profiles, four ways to use NASLORD
The same product isn’t sold — or deployed — the same way for a storage team, a finance department, a service provider or a university. Here are the four most common paths.
Get out of the ticket queue
Share, export, quota and snapshot requests eat a disproportionate share of storage administrators’ time — five-minute operations, multiplied by dozens of client teams.
- Delegate routine operations to the teams themselves, per access zone
- Keep the governance: roles, confinement and audit log
- Manage all clusters — production, DR, lab — in one place
Typical success measure
Number of administrative tasks delegated during the 90-day trial — every delegated task is a ticket that was never opened, and a wait that never happened.
Anonymized example: Canadian healthcare organization managing multiple PowerScale environments, whose research teams now administer their own shares and quotas within their access zone.
Attach every terabyte to a budget
Storage growth is your most predictable expense — and the least governed. Without cost allocation, demand is infinite; without forecasting, every infrastructure refresh is a surprise.
- Allocate 100% of consumption to identified owners
- Budgets, thresholds and forecasts per department, with automatic alerts
- Monthly reports delivered to finance with no manual effort
Typical success measure
Reduction in manual reporting effort, and percentage of consumption allocated to an owner by the end of the evaluation.
Anonymized example: government organization requiring tenant-level storage accountability, with quarterly reports delivered to the departments concerned.
Bill precisely, isolate cleanly
For a service provider, chargeback is not a transparency exercise: it is revenue. And client isolation is not a best practice: it is a contractual clause.
- Distinct chargeback profile per client: rates, currency and units
- Billing reports generated and delivered automatically to each client
- Optional self-service portal, confined to each client’s environment
Typical success measure
Accuracy of monthly per-client billing, and report turnaround time — from days of manual work to a scheduled delivery.
Anonymized example: service provider hosting multiple clients on a shared ObjectScale infrastructure, each client billed for the capacity, requests and egress actually consumed.
Account for usage, grant by grant
Faculties, departments, laboratories, funded projects: public organizations have to demonstrate who uses what — often without actually billing. That is exactly what showback is for.
- Showback per faculty, department or grant, with no actual billing
- Self-service for research groups, traceability for the institution
- Data kept in your environment — no external telemetry
Typical success measure
The ability to answer, with numbers, the question “who is consuming our storage?” — per administrative entity and per period, at budget time.
Anonymized example: higher-education institution allocating PowerScale consumption across faculties and research groups, with quotas delegated per access zone.
NASLORD versus scripts, spreadsheets and native-only management
| Criterion | Homegrown scripts + spreadsheets | Native tools only | NASLORD |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost allocation | Manual, monthly, fragile to staff turnover | Nonexistent | Continuous, automated, historized |
| Budgets and forecasts | Spreadsheet formulas, no alerts | Nonexistent | Built-in thresholds, alerts and projections |
| Delegation to teams | Impossible without exposing the scripts | Broad administrative rights required | Self-service confined by zone and role |
| Multi-application immutable copies | CLI scripts to maintain and monitor | Depends on the backup application | Automated at the DD level, application-agnostic |
| Audit and traceability | Scattered | Generic system logs | Unified log per user, zone and action |
| Maintenance cost | Your engineering time, continuously | — | Supported product, updates provided |
Don’t see your scenario here?
Describe your environment — that is exactly what the 20-minute discovery call is for.