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