Too many Servers, not enough eyes - where did all these servers come from???! (1 of 9)

Based on my experiences in formal Capacity Planning and Performance Management departments – starting with a large company that had few servers and many analysts and concluding with an even larger company that better reflects the title.I'm going to outline the methodology that allows analysts and planners to target their limited resources at systems (and more importantly, applications) that require the most attention as the number of servers grows and the number of analysts decreases.
Follow my series, which starts today..........

 In the past decade, the size of server farms has increased dramatically, while the numbers of performance analysts and capacity planners have remained steady or decreased. In order to manage this environment and ensure that analysts look at the applications that either have or are likely to exhibit performance problems, there needs to be a plan to reduce the number of applications targeted for analysis that includes: Automation of all processes as much as practical; Exploitation of computational intelligence to interpret results and do “smart” trending; Automated event management and alerting; Interactive analysis, for drill-down and model building;Analytic modeling of servers and applications.

Building a methodology around these points will help understaffed data centers and overworked analyst staff make their workloads more manageable, provide proactive support to data center management, and more importantly, to the business units they ultimately support.

When business managers used to ask for details on why performance was poor, analysts would write highly technical documents that described servers in terms of resource consumption using metrics and terms that no business manager could possibly be expected to understand. For reasons more related to pride than understanding, the business managers asked few questions and generally accepted the explanations and recommendations of the technical staff, even though their real questions generally went unanswered.

Notice also that they referenced servers, not applications, and certainly not end-to-end user experience or response times. A decade ago, many of the applications running on distributed systems ran on one, or at most a few, servers.  Rather than consider applications as a whole and the end-user experience, analysts would look at reports for individual servers and take a very large step by theorizing that if all the servers have “reasonable” resource consumption numbers that the application likely had acceptable performance.

This server-focused mentality only added to the disconnect that existed between the data center management and the business unit management.

To download the full version of this blog visit http://www.metron-athene.com/_downloads/_documents/papers/too_many_servers.pdf

Rich Fronheiser  
Consultant