Monday 29 November 2010

Is your Capacity Planning effective?

Well, so much for my personal capacity planning.  Next week sees me taking care of birthdays for my better half and myself, as well as Metron attending two major conferences and exhibitions.  At least I’ll be at home for the better half’s birthday, take her to dinner, provide a present.

The rest of the week sees the Metron team split across the two events: the Gartner Data Center Summit and CMG.

It’s our first time at the Gartner Data Center Summit and we’re all excited at the prospect of being involved.  I attended last year to assess the event and was impressed.  The sessions I attended on topics such as Cloud and virtualization were ahead of other events in terms of the topics that were being discussed.  This year looks to be the same.  Rather than ‘how do I virtualize’ or ‘what is Cloud’ it is looking at the next stage for data centers: having virtualized to a degree, how do we now fully exploit virtualization and reap the full benefits we expected?; now I know what Cloud is, how do I decide between public, private and hybrid and what effect will all this have on infrastructure and operations?

This all dovetails nicely with where we are with our Athene capacity management software.  We’ll be announcing Athene Integrator, the next generation of our custom data import facility.  This enables any data to be brought into Athene’s central capacity repository: infrastructure; business; environmental.  In a Cloud world where capacity management needs to bring together data from any source, many of them outside your direct control, this flexibility for data capture is what any large organization is going to need.  We’re running webinars to tell people what we are doing about Cloud and capacity management – find out at http://www.metron-athene.com/training/webinars/index.html. 

The CMG (Computer Measurement Group) annual event is of course one that Metron has been supporting for many years.  It’s more technical focus than the Gartner Data Center Summit allows us to tell the ‘hands on’ capacity management world about our exciting new collaboration with Correlsense.  Combining Correlsense’s SharePath business transaction management software with our Athene capacity planning solution enables forward infrastructure plans to be based on business transactions rather than traditional IT resource metrics.  There have been various attempts to reach this holy grail over the years, but this is the first one to achieve the goal in a practical, timely and affordable way.  You can find out more about this at http://www.metron-athene.com/_downloads/published_papers/index.asp. 

So much to tell everyone about, two places to be at one time, presents to buy.  If you bump into me at the Gartner event feel free to buy me a drink to celebrate my birthday – I might need it!


Andrew Smith Chief Sales & Marketing Officer

Friday 26 November 2010

Transition to Agile development

As a leading provider of Capacity Planning and Performance Management software we’re always looking at ways to enhance our software and meet the needs of you, our customers.
If you’ve been following our news you’ll probably be aware of our hook up with RADTAC in our move to agile development – exciting times.
I’d be lying if I said that our transition had been easy and completely smooth but considering the challenges involved whenever you make a change to new processes, it ‘s now looking good.
I was reading an article by Katie Serignese in SDTimes http://www.sdtimes.com/link/34886 and have to agree that Agile can indeed be a bumpy ride!  Credit to my team then, who have embraced the culture change so quickly.
Our focus has always been on delivering quality software that is useful to our customers and agile development means that we can deliver larger changes, more rapidly and with no compromise to quality.
I’ll update you on new developments to Athene, our Capacity Management software soon and in particular Athene Integrator, the next generation of our custom data import facility.  
http://www.metron-athene.com/reference/press/press_releases/press_201006_metron_adopts_agile_practices_for_the_next_generation_of_athene_development.html

Dave Watson, SVP Development

Wednesday 24 November 2010

Blogger Andrew JT Smith said...

Hi, We now have webinars (Transaction based Capacity Planning for Greater IT Reliability)set up talking about our partnership with Correlsense and how it enables full business capacity planning. You can register at https://metron-athene.webex.com/mw0306lc/mywebex/default.do?siteurl=metron-athene&service=6. Regards, Andrew

Monday 22 November 2010

Capacity Management - at the Heart of Green IT

It’s nice to know that despite the current economic climate there is still plenty of interest in Green IT and its related issues.
How do I know this? We were at the Green IT Expo recently and the place was heaving.
Very heartening, on a personal note, that my speaker session on the role of Capacity Management in Green IT was standing room only.
To tell the truth I’m not really surprised that there is a surge of interest in capacity planning and modelling now, new technologies like Virtualization and Cloud, and the inherent need to monitor and control them have come to the fore – putting Capacity Management very much at centre stage.
The principles of effective Capacity management are a good reflection of Green IT and everything it stands for.
You can hear my musings on the subject at our free webinar in February http://www.metron-athene.com/training/webinars/webinar_summaries.html



Ian Upton SVP, UK Sales and Business Development