Capacity management – dates for your diary!

As we’ve re-iterated across many of our blogs the job of the Capacity Manager and those in capacity management roles has got increasingly more difficult over the years due to the diversity of the enterprise.

We recognise this fact and though there aren’t many things in life that you can get for free we continue to run our series of free educational webinars focussed solely on capacity management. Increasingly high numbers of attendees, from across the globe, confirm that our topics are those that are of most interest to you at the moment.

We have a great package of events coming up over the next few months.

In December we’re running 3 events, kicking off tomorrow with Cloud Computing and Capacity Management, a look at what it will be realistic for the capacity manager to provide to the business in this complex world of interacting services.

This is followed by an athene® Live! Event, on December 13 which showcases how we address capacity management for Cloud in practice with our own athene® software, Integrator data integration solution and SharePath end to end transaction monitoring software.

On December 15 we’re back again with Capacity Management for SAN Attached Storage where we’ll be discussing ways to assist the storage administrator in the complex task of managing SAN attached storage.

Our New Year agenda is already set and will be looking at Modeling, vSphere5 vs Hyper-V and Green IT amongst other topics. Check it out and register to come along to our events http://www.metron-athene.com/training/webinars/webinar_summaries.html

If you have your own ideas for capacity management topics you'd like us to cover, drop me an email at Andrew.smith@metron-athene.com and I'm sure we can put together a session for you.

I look forward to meeting you at our webinars.

Andrew Smith

Chief Sales & marketing Officer

The key to making Cloud Computing work within an enterprise is an effective Capacity Management process.

Cloud Computing is an area that has garnered much attention in the IT industry and it looks as though all organizations will have some form of Cloud implementation over the next few years.

What Cloud Computing is allowing organizations to do is manage their resources in a way in which the infrastructure does not continually spiral in growth. This could be a mix of private and public Cloud, and for public cloud it could involve a variety of external providers.

The main reason Cloud Computing works is because of virtualization both on the x86 and Unix/Linux platforms.  The key to making Cloud Computing work within an enterprise is an effective Capacity Management process. 

An enterprise should have a Dashboard / Portal along with regularly scheduled reports that not only the IT staff, but also the Business Owners can look at to assess their environments. 

It's critical to keep the Business Owners apprised of their resource usage as it could change dynamically as other factors in the environment change.   The types of reports you would produce for a Private, Community or Hybrid Cloud architecture may have similar qualities but need to provide a focus to the particular resource used. 

 

What is without doubt, is that the range of environments you will have to manage will become ever more complex. What you can and should do in terms of capacity management will vary with the nature of your own implementation.

Join me on December 1 at a webinar and find out what it will be realistic for the capacity manager to provide to the business in this complex world of interacting services, and how we can help you achieve it.

http://www.metron-athene.com/training/webinars/index.html

Charles Johnson,

Principal Consultant

Cloud Computing and Capacity Management

One significant change with the move to Cloud based systems is that capacity management becomes a much more strategic activity than in the past. 

 Analyst groups such as Gartner are promoting this evolution and it is further supported by initiatives such as the ITIL® v3 refresh.  Rather than a purely resource level task, capacity management now needs to be an integral part of how the business chooses what is the best solution, for example between private and public Cloud.

What you buy across the cloud could vary from simple Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS) such as processing power and disk storage through to full Software As A Service (SaaS) offerings like salesforce.com, where the provider delivers you hardware, application and more importantly, is responsible for service quality.

For anything other than SaaS, the need to use capacity management techniques to plan requirements in advance will be ever more important.  Buying something in advance is cheaper than buying at the last minute. Emergency buying of Cloud resource (cloud bursts) might be easy to do but it is likely to be prohibitively expensive over time.

With service potentially coming from a variety of internal and external sources, guaranteeing service quality becomes both more difficult yet more necessary. 

What is without doubt is that the range of environments you will have to manage will become ever more complex and what you can and should do in terms of capacity management will vary with the nature of your own implementation.

From a capacity perspective you won’t be able to measure everything you want in the Cloud so measure what you can, control what you can and don’t worry about the rest.  Tools and processes that support this open approach such as those provided by us are an essential.

Find out what it will be realistic for the capacity manager to provide to the business in this complex world of interacting services by coming along to our free webinar on December 1st.

http://www.metron-athene.com/training/webinars/index.html

Andrew Smith
Chief Sales and Marketing Officer