What’s VITAL from your Capacity Management provider?

It’s not been uncommon over the years for software vendors in the capacity management sphere to evolve.  They might get bought out, sometimes twice in 2 years, get merged into the product line of a larger business, go out of business altogether or change direction and move away from capacity management.  This blog outlines some of the dangers to users of software products from companies who sell out, go out of business or change direction.

Change can be both good and bad for you as a user of their software.  On the positive side, it might mean the range of functionality in your product gets quickly expanded.  You might benefit from becoming part of a larger user community.  The change might mean your future needs are being anticipated by the provider, seeing what you will need from capacity management before you have that need.

The change is not always in your best interests though.  If the software you have come to rely on isn’t strategic for its new owners, it might be ‘sunsetted’, have little or no further development.  Existing products can come to be seen as ‘cash cows’, mature products from which maintenance revenues to the supplier need to be maximised to fund new initiatives – possibly unrelated to your on-going product needs.  Without development and commitment from their supplier, products slowly wither and die, often while maintenance bills increase.  The human side of change should never be underestimated either.  All the support experience you rely on is often let go.  New management might lack the background of those who originally created the solution you use and want to move what elements of your software they retain in a different direction. 

So, if a supplier of a product you are dependent on sells out or parachutes new management in, you might want to consider a few key questions.  I’m biased, I know. 

Metron has retained a consistent focus throughout our 30 year existence.  The points below contrast our approach to changes in businesses I have seen in my 30 years in capacity management.

Do you really want:

A supplier with…

…executives who don’t know your job?

…a marketing budget pushing the latest craze?

…the products you use being ‘sunsetted’?

…sudden large increases in your maintenance bill?

…the people you rely on to support you being let go?

Probably not.  What you might prefer is:

A solution with a future

If the product you’re using isn’t part of the big new marketing push and re-branding, then it’s not going to get the development you need to keep your Capacity Management process successful.

athene® from Metron remains the company’s core solution and primary focus

A solution delivered by experts

If your solution comes from a company whose executive staff has less than two years’ experience in Capacity Management, chances are they won’t understand your needs.

The least experienced of Metron’s executive team has over 10 years knowledge and experience specifically in capacity management.

An expert team to support you

If new people come in and the experienced and skilled staff that you have come to rely on to support you are released, the pool of knowledge available to help you is lessened.

Metron blends a young and creative software development team with design, consulting, support and management staff who each bring between 10 and 30 years of specific capacity management and planning knowledge to the business.

A financial solution you can trust

In an economy that is only growing slowly, it’s painful if your provider tries to use you as a cash cow with up to 60% increases in the maintenance you pay, to help them develop their new strategy.

Metron rewards the loyalty of its clients, with offers for guaranteed future maintenance commitment and reducing maintenance bills for loyal clients

Something in return for the maintenance you pay

If the products you are licensed for are ‘sunsetted’ by your supplier, although they often won’t state this explicitly, they won’t get the on-going investment to evolve with your needs.  Maybe you’re just paying for their change in strategy or their new offices.

Metron continues to reinvest profits in the on-going development of athene®, as we have done for 30 years.

A product strategy, not just the latest fad

So many companies jump on the latest bandwagon chasing what they see as the easy money.  That often leads to a solution that doesn’t meet the day to day problems you face.  You want a capacity management solution focussed on capacity management, not the latest buzzwords.

Metron works closely with its client base to develop athene® to meet their needs as they change, ensuring continuity of product applicability, helping you always retain your focus on the questions you need to answer now.

Innovation that anticipates what you will need

As your needs evolve, you need a capacity management solution ready to help you meet them.

Ever since helping define the ITIL Capacity Management good practice guidelines, Metron has continuously reinvested profits in ensuring athene® stays ahead of the game.  For example, import of business information and analytics to correlate business and technical data for capacity planning has been a feature of athene® for more than 10 years.

Find out why now is a good time to consider a provider who values Capacity Management more than the latest marketing trend.

http://www.metron-athene.com/products/athene-capacity-management-software/index.html

Metron and our athene® software offer the company focus, strategy, development and product functionality that other capacity management solutions have, plus a few VITAL things that they don’t.

Andrew Smith

Chief Executive Officer

Is it worth considering SaaS for Capacity Management? (3 of 3)

I left you with the question on Monday of 'Where does this leave you?' and I guess I have raised as many questions as I have answered. 

This is no surprise as whether or not SaaS is the best model for your Capacity Management depends on your organization and your needs.  The questions are really the same as any outsourcing decision: who will do what and will it be worth the money?.

There are of course some questions that might be a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer for your organization.  If your security policies are such that any capacity data will not be allowed to be transferred out of the business, SaaS is not for you.  Understanding and getting answers to these questions first will save a lot of wasted time and effort considering options.

 
My concern would always be over the intangible area of knowledge.  While I can see a third party being able to meet a regular, standard, repeated reporting requirement, much of the value of Capacity Management is beyond this.  Whenever I visit our clients I am always impressed at the breadth of knowledge the Capacity Management team has across both IT and the business.  It is taking this knowledge and combining it with the raw information produced from technical capacity data that is the source of true Capacity Management value to me.  For this reason alone I can see the value in passing the logistics of Capacity Management to a SaaS provider.  Let them have the delights of keeping software up to date, ensuring there is adequate hardware resource at any time and so on. I would then usually prefer to have the intellectual capital, the use and application of that data allied to knowledge of my own business, kept in-house.  Replacing it will take time and money.

That is just one man’s opinion however.  Your organization might benefit from an expert Capacity Management business managing their capacity issues from cradle to grave, raw data to information to support your business decisions.  In this instance I would always recommend a specialist Capacity Management company with experience to bring.  Their Capacity Management knowledge and experience will be a lot harder to find than a business that can simply provide and maintain infrastructure and software for you.

If there is one area of conclusion therefore, it would be around the issue of expertise.  Whether your Capacity Management is on premise or SaaS, someone needs specialist Capacity Management knowledge and the ability to apply that knowledge to issues unique to your organization.   Whatever route you take, make sure that experience is on your payroll, or that of your provider.

 

If you don’t, all you might get is data.

Take a look at our SaaS Capacity Management http://www.metron-athene.com/products/athene-capacity-management-software-as-a-service/index.html

Andrew Smith

Chief Executive Officer

Is it worth considering SaaS for Capacity Management? (2 of 3)

As I said on Friday it's not always about the cash.

Running software in-house means more than just buying a product, then sitting back and watching it do your Capacity Management on its own.  If only the world were that simple!  Other factors are needed in place and working well to make Capacity Management successful.

Resources are needed to run in-house software.  These include machine resources such as servers, disks and network to run the chosen or developed products.  Typically today, time is needed from many teams within an IT infrastructure division to get a product up and running.  This can include desktop support, systems administrators, network support, database administrators and more.  A good installation will need Capacity Management to be integrated at a process level with other functions such as Change, Incident and Problem Management.  Getting all the right resources in place to implement and run a product, with effective processes to make sure it runs to the benefit of the business, can be a complex and time consuming task.  It all adds to the cost of that product and the risk of it taking too long see a return on investment.  The costs and involvement of resources and people doesn’t cease with implementation.  On-going support and resources, both IT infrastructure and people, are needed to keep a product delivering what it is intended to deliver.  Done well, it presents an excellent technical solution.  You have a Capacity Management product picked specifically to suit your needs.  You have a team of people, equipped with the right resources, to make the function a successful contributor to the business.

SaaS for your Capacity Management offers benefits that contrast with the software ownership model.  By paying for a service hosted by another supplier in the Cloud, you move so many of those costs on to your supplier.  Which will be the right model for you then becomes an equation. One has to compare the cost for providing those in-house resources against the charges from your SaaS supplier, assuming the end product from the two is the same.

Probably the most common assumption is that you retain the skilled Capacity Management personnel in-house. They can apply their knowledge of your business and its needs to the Capacity Management data managed by the SaaS provider.  Essentially this model transfers the administrative costs of providing a Capacity Management service to the provider.  It becomes their job to ensure there are sufficient processing resources to store and manage your capacity data.  It is their job to make sure the environment in which the software is running and the software itself, with any supporting products, is up to date, maintained and managed effectively.   The costs of providing the infrastructure are passed to the SaaS provider.  This leaves you with zero cost for creating and maintaining your Capacity Management infrastructure and zero cost on other teams within your organization to support it.

Costs are rarely absolutely zero however.  There can be many variations on this basic scenario and each organization will need to decide what suits them best if outsourcing to the Cloud.  The key is usually to define the boundaries where responsibilities meet.  If capacity data is to be captured within your organization and sent to your SaaS provider in the Cloud, one needs to define who has the responsibility for data capture.  There will be agents or agentless software to implement and manage to enable this.  There is the software and network issue of how that data gets to the SaaS provider.  Someone needs to own each part of the process and bear the cost of providing that part of the service.  Who is best placed to do that will vary with each set of needs and resources available.  All this assumes of course that your own in-house security is happy with whatever mechanism is used to pass data outside your organization, and that it’s management outside your organization meets your business standards.

Another key decision in terms of the division of responsibility is who will do the ‘value add’ Capacity Management work.  If your decision to use SaaS is purely to move the cost of maintaining an in-house infrastructure on to someone else, then you will be retaining skilled Capacity Management staff.  They will need access to the Capacity Management software in the Cloud.  Their usage of it will be as if it was an in-house owned and managed product.  They will take the raw data and transform it into the information the business requires.  This can be an efficient and effective model.  Your experienced Capacity Management team are able to leverage their specialist skills to best effect, not lose time doing work that can be better and more cost effectively done by others. 

An alternative is for your SaaS provider to carry out some or all of the skilled Capacity Management work as well as maintaining the environment.  This could provide cheaper labor costs for your organization.  On the flip side, it means you no longer retain that Capacity Management knowledge in-house.  Both its formal and informal value to your business is lost.  In this scenario, what is delivered by the outside organization tends to be highly defined and variations usually mean additional cost.  Aside from the financial concerns, some Capacity Management information cannot be effectively delivered without intimate knowledge of your own organization.  There is always the chance that something is lost if information is delivered by those who don’t have this level of interaction within your business.  It is of course a decision that needs to be right from the start.  Once you lose staff with experience, that knowledge is often gone for good. 

So where does this leave you? I'll conclude by taking a look at this on Wednesday.

Andrew Smith

Chief Executive Office

Is it worth considering SaaS for Capacity Management? (1 of 3)

SaaS and software purchase

Many people seem to be talking about Software as a Service (SaaS) for many things.  Within my own business we use it for a variety of functions: email, CRM, Help Desk, application lifecycle management – to name just a few.  We like the model and have bought into it where we feel it is the best approach.  Small businesses like ours take pride in our flexibility.  SaaS fits in with this ethos.  Money is always important to a small business.  To have moved so much functionality into Cloud based services, we must feel the cost is good.

As a Capacity Management software and services vendor, we now regularly get asked if we will provide our athene® software in SaaS mode.  Many more people have asked, than have gone forward to implementation.  This got me wondering if and why SaaS is the right delivery mechanism for Capacity Management. 

The comparison I am making is with ownership and running software, third party or developed in-house, on premise.  There is a halfway house, managed services, where the software is installed and run at your premises, but managed by a third party.  I’ll leave the managed services comparison out of things for now, as that is by far the least requested and least implemented model in my experience.

Clearly the most common model for running a capacity management function in the past has been on premise software, either developed in-house or purchased from a third party.  The relevant merits and benefits of those two approaches can be considered another time.  For now, I’ll compare having Capacity Management run as SaaS with both.  SaaS is the new kid on the block, and presumably needs to offer something distinctly better than on premise software if it is to tempt people out of their organization and into the Cloud.

Finance

The main driver for many decisions is cost, and SaaS offers a very different cost model compared to owning software.  It often boils down to a difference between ‘capex’ and ‘opex’, capital expenses and operating expenses.  Is there a cost saving for one compared to the other, or are they just different ways of accounting for money?  Although this can vary by country, the main financial difference between the two can be how they are treated from a tax perspective.  For SaaS, in many tax regimes, 100% of the software charge is tax allowable each year, against a much smaller proportion for purchased software.  For this reason alone, your CFO might prefer SaaS.

There are other related cash benefits.  From a CFO’s perspective, predictable but flexible cash flow is preferred. SaaS offers these things.  Costs are typically flat over whatever period you pay.  After some initial set up charges, payments are often made for shorter periods than software purchase, for example monthly or quarterly.  This contrasts with software purchase, typified by a high initial one time cost and an annual maintenance payment.  Unless a payment schedule is agreed with your supplier, this means a higher upfront cash outlay than for SaaS, irrespective of how the business internally accounts for that expenditure.  Being tied in to annual maintenance paid in advance can mean a business feels there is no flexibility with software ownership.  Once the payment is made, getting any cash back is unlikely.

SaaS offers the promise of being able to flex resources, and therefore expenditure, on much smaller time scales, e.g. monthly, in response to demand.

A final area where SaaS might appeal to your CFO is the speed of the return on investment compared to traditional software ownership.  That big upfront payment for software means you have to use it for some time before the benefits you receive from using it outweigh the money spent.  If you have less money spent upfront and a small monthly payment with SaaS, you cross that line much quicker.  SaaS also offers the promise of being able to downscale your Capacity Management to fit budgets and ensure it provides return on the money spent.  Software purchase means that once the money is spent, it is spent.  If the return on investment isn’t as much as expected, the expenditure side of the equation cannot be adjusted.

It’s not always about the cash…

Running software in-house means more than just buying a product, then sitting back and watching it do your Capacity Management on its own.  If only the world were that simple!  Other factors are needed in place and working well to make Capacity Management successful. I'll deal with this on Monday.

In the meantime take a look at athene^®SaaS  http://www.metron-athene.com/products/athene-capacity-management-software-as-a-service/index.html

Andrew Smith

Chief Executive Officer

Capacity Management and Business Value Dashboards

Business Value Dashboards (BVDs) could be a significant step forward for IT Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) in making that connection with the business, finally getting perceived as a contributor, not just a cost.  Unlike executive dashboards, which have typically tried to present purely IT metrics in a coherent fashion to senior management, BVDs typically are much more closely aligned to particular lines of business.  It helps me to think of the difference between ‘January uptime, 98%’ (Executive Dashboard) and ‘January Uptime 98%, Lost revenue for APAC, $1.5m (BVD)’ 

The latter has certain key differences:

-        It needs the APAC region to provide a link between downtime and the effect on their revenue

-        The need for and desirability for that metric starts with the APAC region, not I&O

-        A lot of information, much of it non-I&O data, might be needed to define that relationship 

Those differences define for me why the BVD needs to be distinct from any product in any specific area of I&O.  Chances are that defining those business metrics starting from an I&O tool will mean the metric is geared towards where that I&O tool is comfortable: network metrics for a network tool; storage metrics for a storage tool; server metrics for a traditional capacity tool.  To have an effective BVD, the need is for the definition to start with the business metric, not be ‘steered’ in this way by what I&O tools can offer.   

For this reason I see non-specific tools as being best suited to being the BVD.  As a provider of a capacity management tool, I don’t see doing that as our role.  That’s not to say we won’t play a critical role in what is displayed, but more about that later. 

There are plenty of good contenders already out there.  I’ve seen excellent examples of BVDs using tools like Splunk and Tableau.  They are specialists in being that ‘dashboards of dashboards’, being the one screen at the top level, pulling together a huge range of disparate data.  As well as capacity data from our athene® software, I’ve seen BVDs with business data such as calls made, orders placed, geographical data, Twitter feeds and more, all heavily dependent on the business application and requirement.  Such dashboard tools are so well established, they also tend to have experienced users, skilled in the techniques needed to manipulate and display the data required by the business units.  

Thinking of my own space, that’s not a job for which a capacity analyst is necessarily qualified.  Their specialization is capacity, and they will concentrate on feeding the right capacity data into the BVD in the right way.  Capacity management and planning are specialist skills.  Practitioners need to understand what is required of them from the business and then have the very difficult job of translating that into data requirements that they can feed forward into a BVD, but the broader composition of the BVD picture is outside their remit if they are to retain sufficient focus on capacity issues.

My preference is to see BVDs provided by dashboard specialists and capacity issues handled by capacity specialists.  I want to see capacity tools that deliver the best capacity management support they can and not  be diluted by attempts to be all things to all people.  Capacity analysts need capacity dashboards, these are not BVDs, but a feature of the capacity tools an analyst uses.

To create the best BVD with the best capacity information as desired within it, this needs to be a two-way street.  Yes, capacity analysts need to understand how to map the desired business metric onto the data they have available, then present data back to the BVD that enables it to show performance against that target.  Of course, critical in doing that is having the right data available – traditional capacity management.

In addition, the capacity analyst still has a job to do outside any consideration of the BVD.  To do this effectively means taking business data and using that as part of their day to day capacity management: correlating business data against observed capacity metrics; understanding how variance in one affects the other; building a pool of data that enables forecasting of capacity to be more accurately attuned to business change.

It's for this reason that with our own software we have concentrated on providing an open interface to exchange data between athene® and a huge range of other products.  Dashboards and BVDs are the latest incarnation of where we both deliver and receive information.  Our role is not to be the BVD, but to feed it and support it, to help bridge that gap between I&O and be seen as a contributor to business goals, not just a cost.

Andrew Smith

Chief Executive Officer

Some end of 2015 thoughts from our CEO....

Gartner identified their Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2015 at their October Symposium in Orlando. See http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2867917. 

Knowing how capacity management people just love statistics, I thought I’d offer a percentage relevance/impact on capacity management of the 10 items from Metron’s perspective. What can’t be denied is that dependent on your industry, any or all of these will impact you at some stage if you are a capacity manager. 

Top 10 Item Capacity Management Impact     2015        Trend

Computing Everywhere                                        100%           à

Whether it is providing support for mobile devices with our athene® software or helping people handle the mass of data being generated as their own industry makes increasing use of them, this is definitely a major direction for Metron. 

Internet of Things                                                    20%           ↑ 

Some impact so far as our clients have had to deal with increasing volumes of data, predominantly due to Cloud based implementations. This will only increase as the Internet of Things becomes more pervasive, for example the predicted rapid growth in pay-per-use applications. 

3D Printing                                                                   5%           ↑ 

With shipments of 3D printers expected to double in 2016, this is clearly a major growth area. For Metron, we are starting to see the impact on applications with embedded links to 3D printing increasing the processing load on environments further. 

Advanced, pervasive and invisible analytics        50%         ↑

More and more systems, more and more data, means analytics needs to get smarter. Research and development for Metron continues to focus on new ways to intuitively analyze and use the ever- increasing pool of data available to capacity managers. 

Context Rich Systems                                                20%         ↑

New research and development in the works includes development of context-sensitive planning techniques to enable capacity planning to evolve with the emerging world rapid deployment, rapid change systems. 

Smart machines                                                         10%         ↑

The smarter the machine the greater the impact if it fails. Even with ever cheaper commoditized components, manufacturing will continue to want to optimize costs. Ensuring just the right capacity is available to each component of your smart car or helpful household robot will be essential to enable producers to maximize profits and keep feeding that next generation of R&D.

Cloud/Client Computing                                        100%         à

Already a significant element of life for an capacity Manager or Capacity Management software provider. Stories already circulate of overspend and uncontrolled spend on Cloud systems. Over time, businesses will increasingly need capacity management to prevent and remove the waste. For Metron, ever more development effort goes on enhancing the tools available to do this.

Software Defined Application and Infrastructure 50%      ↑

Metron moved to the agile principles underpinning SDA and SDI some years ago for our own in- house development, seeing how our software would need to evolve ever quicker in response to changing demands. Work underway now looks to provide the same agile approach to rules and models in our future software to deliver rapid response, self-learning capacity planning and management techniques.

Web-Scale It                                                                   20%     ↑

Many of our clients are now starting to deploy Cloud style systems pioneered by the likes of Google and Facebook, within their own data centers. For some time past and looking well ahead, Metron has been concentrating software enhancements on ensuring that our software evolves to support evolving data center architectures, while still supporting the traditional implementations that will provide core organization systems for some time.

Risk-Based Security and Self-Protection                    5%      ↑

With all of Metron’s athene® facilities being increasingly provided as web-based applications, work continues to provide ever-increasing application security, to supplement the sophisticated perimeter security now deployed by all our clients.

We hope all of our clients and friends have a wonderful holiday and we'll see you in 2016.

Andrew Smith

CEO, Metron

Capacity Management: Operational or Strategic? (3 of 4)

In my previous blog in this series I outlined how valuable operational capacity tools are at addressing what are essentially performance concerns related to capacity, for example, how many more VMs can my Host support?  

Such products do not provide a complete picture.  If this is your only capacity management work, it risks missing broader and longer term capacity issues which when addressed  will also have direct financial benefit to your business.

The other day I read an article comparing capacity management to walking with a stone in your shoe.  Operational capacity management is taking the stone out of your shoe either when it has started to hurt you, or when you first feel it is there but before it has caused you any real pain.Much better practice is to fasten the shoe so well that the stone never gets in there in the first place.  

This is strategic capacity management – taking action well in advance to remove the risk that the problem ever occurs.  

No matter how well you tie the shoe, you won’t be able to keep every piece of grit out but you will prevent the larger and nastier stones from getting in there and surprising you.

Not all events we need to plan for can be based on what is happening on the system at the moment.  Just capturing current performance metrics and basing capacity decisions on them is not enough.  We might assess how many more VMs a host can support based on past measurements but in the case of a change to our web site this may change the profile of how users interact with our systems. Capacity could be consumed in ways in which past resource profiles no longer serve as a guide. 

Another example is merger and acquisition, here you need measurement of performance and this can involve bringing together metrics from many disparate systems, across what have up to that point been separate businesses.

What you need then is something that lets you predict capacity based on something other than past performance.  Strategic capacity management needs that past performance data when it is relevant – often much can be learned from past trends in system usage.  

Extrapolating forward can tell us something about how busy our systems will be in the future.  Bringing in business level inputs means that more than trends and extrapolation is required, for example the capability to introduce step change to trends or analytically model how service levels will change over time.

Strategic capacity management tools like Metron’s athene® provide this greater breadth of planning functionality.  This supplements day to day performance orientated operational capacity management activity using point solutions.  

http://www.metron-athene.com/products/athene/datacapture.html

One phrase – capacity management, but two differing definitions and deliverables.

On Thursday I'll summarize what I have been saying about operational and strategic capacity management.

Andrew Smith

Chief Executive Officer

Capacity Management: Operational or Strategic? (2 of 4)

In my previous blog I defined two types of capacity management, operational and strategic.

The capacity management promoted by so many point tools for technologies such as VMware is definitely operational.  Performance metrics are collected and analysed, usage of current capacity is assessed and then recommendations are made.  This could be a statement of how many more VMs a host can support, or what workloads should be moved where to avoid running out of capacity. 

Operational capacity management sits much happier as a silo-based activity.  Each silo such as VMware, networks or storage, benefit from tools developed and tuned to their own environment. 

Such tools enable small and highly specific recommendations to be made to tune a system to avoid short term capacity issues.  Such tools are more likely to integrate with that core silo technology, enabling automated change or parameters or movement of workloads.  Cost savings will accrue in small amounts through many small actions.

Undoubtedly these are capacity issues.  Also undoubtedly they are operational issues: short term fixes to problems that are about to occur based on what is known of the environment at that point in time.  

This is valuable work and worthy of implementing specialist solutions.  Nowadays everyone has heard people say ‘Well, think of the cost if the web site is down for a minute’.  Operational capacity management tools are an essential component in making sure such eventualities don’t happen.

Don’t be fooled into thinking that such point solutions are a complete capacity management solution however.  I will contrast them with strategic capacity management solutions on Monday to illustrate why just taking one approach, strategic or operational, is not enough.

In the meantime don't forget to register for our 'Data Correlation in Capacity Management' webinar  http://www.metron-athene.com/services/webinars/index.html

Andrew Smith

Chief Executive Officer

Capacity Management: Operational or Strategic? (1 of 4)

Many software suppliers seem to be talking about how they do capacity management these days.  

In the server area of infrastructure management alone you have:

·        Established businesses that have been offering data capture, capacity database and a    range of capacity reporting for some time.   Typically these businesses have started in one technology area such as mainframe or Unix and spread their coverage across platforms as IT has evolved.

·        Point solutions that analyse current performance and make tuning recommendations

·        Framework providers touting capacity management as one of the modules within their toolset.  Often this is the result of acquisition of a third party capacity management product that then gets increasingly integrated with their framework

·        SaaS/Cloud solutions that take in data from one or many environments

In this blog, I’d like to consider the first two of these options.

Common with environments that support rapid provisioning, is confusion between the first and second areas.  Both groups talk of capacity management, but the focus of what capacity is being managed is different.  This is not the metrics or applications that are being watched, more the time frame and nature of capacity events that are being reviewed.

In days gone past, one might have talked of this as the difference between capacity management and performance management.  As everyone seems to be using the terminology much more interchangeably these days, perhaps it is better expressed as strategic capacity management and operational capacity management.

Operational capacity management is based on measured performance metrics and recommends operational changes, e.g. moving VMs.

Strategic capacity management is based on taking action well in advance to remove the risks and problems before they occur.

I’ll be taking a look at both of these types of capacity management on Friday, in the meantime why not sign up to our Community and access our range of capacity management white papers and webinars http://www.metron-athene.com/_resources/index.html

Andrew Smith

Chief Executive Officer