Managing Subscription Plans

Provisioning is the process of assigning services and quotas to users or tenants in subscription plans.

CTERA includes two levels of provisioning:

• End-user provisioning
  The virtual portal owner provisions end users with services and quotas, such as storage space and the number of agents.
  In team portals, end-user provisioning is optional and is performed by team or global administrators.
  In reseller portals, end-user provisioning is performed by staff or global administrators.
• Portal-level provisioning
  The CTERA Portal owner provisions each virtual portal owner with services and quotas. For example, it is possible to limit a virtual portal to use a total of up to 100GB of storage space and 50 workstation agents.
  Portal-level provisioning is performed by global administrators.
  The following provisioning methods are available for portal-level provisioning:
  • Global plans
    In order to obtain services, virtual portals are assigned to a global plan which defines a set of services that the portal will receive, and which will subsequently be used by the portal's end users. Further, the plan can specify a maximum snapshot retention policy for the portal. See CTERA Portal Snapshots (Backups).
  • Global add-ons
    In addition to the global plan, one or more global add-ons can be added to portals. Each global add-on defines a set of services that portals will receive in addition to the services specified in the global plan. For example, an add-on may include an additional 10 GB of storage space for the number of devices specified in the global plan. Add-ons can be set to expire after a specified time period and can be stacked as desired. For example, a portal may have a subscription plan for 100 GB of storage, as well as two add-ons for 10GB of storage and one add-on for 5GB of storage. While the add-ons are valid, the portal will be entitled to allocate up to 125GB of cloud storage to end users.

You provision licenses to virtual portals, by assigning the virtual portals to global plans and add-ons.

Provisioning for a Team Portal

When a team portal is assigned to a global plan or add-on, CTERA Portal automatically creates a default subscription plan containing the licenses specified in the global plan and add-ons, and assigns all user accounts in the team portal to this plan. The global plan limits the total amount of resources used by end users. Portal Licenses are consumed immediately, when the team portal is provisioned. You can create alternate subscription plans and assign those to individual user accounts. Users in a team portal obtain services through their subscription plans for an open-ended period of time without payment.

Provisioning for a Reseller Portal

When a reseller portal is assigned to a global plan or add-on, it is necessary to provision licenses to individual user accounts by creating subscription plans and add-ons and assigning the user accounts to the desired plans and packages. The global plan limits the total amount of storage space (and other resources, such as server agents and workstation agents) allocated to a reseller portal's end users. That is, if a reseller provisions a 10GB storage quota to an end user, then 10GB of the reseller's storage space quota is consumed immediately, regardless of whether the end user actually uses the entire 10GB of storage space. Likewise, Portal Licenses are consumed when the resources are provisioned to the end user. Through subscription plans, users in a reseller portal obtain cloud services for an open-ended period of time with automatically recurring payments. Through add-ons, users can obtain additional cloud services for a defined period of time.

For information on creating non-recurring prepaid service packages, see Managing Add-Ons.