Trend 3 - Cloud-based environments

Let’s take a look at the third trend Cloud-based environments

Cloud computing continues to grow - we have to assume a multi-tenant model, capacity will very rarely be dedicated to finite groups of users or processes. It is very common now that a cloud is going to service multiple organizations, multiple users, multiple services and multiple applications.

“Cloud-bursting”- the ability to provide additional resource at short notice, it can be an efficient option by providing temporary capacity needs but the downside to that is that it can prove very expensive to rely on ‘cloud-bursting’ as a regular option instead of having good management of your resources.

Capacity planners will need to update their skills – nowadays environments are far more complex and there is a need for capacity planners to keep up to date with modern technologies.

Capacity managing and monitoring tools are improving to deal with this trend – Vendors are adjusting their software to keep up with trends.Our own athene® capacity management software has evolved, with Integrator, to allow you to capture, store, report, trend and alert on data from physical, virtual and mainframe environments with the added advantage of bringing in data from “hard to reach” sources.

It’s important to monitor your infrastructure from end to end and watch every transaction. Watching every transaction requires that you are able to look at all transactions, likewise it’s important to be able to get information from each piece of that infrastructure, the servers, the networks, storage and mainframe to be able to piece together how things are performing.

When things don’t perform well you have a lot of information to go back on and help you to determine why you are having performance issues.

I’ll be taking a look at Trend 4 on Monday, enjoy your weekend.

Rich Fronheiser

VP, Strategic Marketing