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

My previous three blogs in this series have defined two forms of capacity management: operational and strategic.  

Unfortunately two quite different activities, with different techniques and objectives, often get confused and thought of as the same thing.  One name, two activities - it can be confusing. 

Effective capacity management for an organization means one needs to understand both activities and ensure all bases are covered.

Operational capacity management sits much happier as a silo-based activity.  System managers need specialist tools tuned to each environment they manage.  Performance data captured for each platform can tell them what capacity issues are hitting or about to hit the system, so they can address the problem and ensure good performance.   This relies on the same data as strategic capacity management, but often needs to be looked at in more detail.  It’s all about the ‘here and now’, ensuring that today’s users are getting the quality of service they require.

Strategic capacity management addresses different but equally valid needs.  Cost savings tend to be less numerous but of higher value.  As a strategic activity it is better run as a central infrastructure function, cutting across silos.  Following ITIL good practice guidelines, it suits a broader service view, with closer ties to business issues such as new service rollout, services and applications that span across multiple silos and step change such as merger and acquisition.  Its concern is less about whether a given VM will need more resource tomorrow, more about if the current investment in Cloud capacity will meet business needs over the next six months.  It uses the same data as operational capacity management, but with less focus on day to day variations, more on longer term trends.  Its concern is ensuring that as the business evolves, users will get the quality of service they require next week, month or year.

Unsurprisingly, organizations, particularly those implementing newer silos, tend to go for operational capacity management first.  In an earlier blog in this series, I likened the need for capacity management to having a stone in your show.  If you can already feel the stone in your shoe, you need it removed straight away.  As operational capacity management gets addressed first, this often this leads to strategic capacity management being encouraged to use operational capacity management tools to meet their needs.  They are already there and collecting the same data, so why not?

The reason is that this never works, as no point solutions offer the broader view that is necessary to strategic capacity management teams. 

Both approaches can feed off the same data, but different approaches, skills and tools are needed to address their respective questions.  

Not reassessing what your objectives for all capacity management are and what tools will deliver the answers you need means that strategic capacity management often fails to be properly addressed.  This can be painful, as all the stones get into your shoe and have to be removed.  

Fighting each problem like this costs your business time and money.  

Understanding the need and getting the right tools in place for the right job ensures short and long term planning needs are catered for and user satisfaction enhanced over time.

The best approach is to understand what you want to do, and then get the right tools to do the job.

Our ‘Data correlation for capacity management’ webinar takes place on July 22, don't forget to register.http://www.metron-athene.com/services/webinars/index.html

Andrew Smith

Chief Executive Officer

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? (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