Holiday Greetings from Paul Malton – CEO

This has been a good year for Metron-Athene.  We have expanded our team of professional people and focussed on feeding back the ideas from the customers into producing our expanding range of Capacity Management tools.  The use of agile development with its fortnightly goal setting has helped to achieve a quicker turnaround in a fast changing environment.  The comments, by customers, on our new offerings continue to be complimentary.

The major deliverable of this approach this year has been our Integrator module.  This enables any data to be imported into the capacity database at the heart of our Athene software.  That data is then available along with any other data captured using Athene’s agents, agentless or framework interface capture modules for use by the extensive analysis, reporting and planning facilities that Athene provides.  Many Integrator ‘Capture Packs’ already exist for areas such as network, storage, application performance monitoring and more.  New ones can be quickly and easily created by Metron or Athene users via the easy-to-use Integrator browser interface.  As with so much in modern life the key is flexibility – Integrator adds to the already wide range of Athene data capture options to enable all capacity data to be stored in and used from one database with one toolset.

The economic background has been challenging and there seems to be no enthusiasm from the political leaders.  In our market what is foremost is the improvement of the usability of information at a reducing cost.   This almost defines Athene.  When companies are facing tough challenges a cost saving product is very popular. 

Thank you to all our staff, customers and partners who work with us.   I hope that you have a very happy holiday and return refreshed and enthusiastic.

Forecasting – When Modeling is not the only Choice

When most organizations are tasked with forecasting changes within their IT environment, many immediately think they have to create models.

There are two types of modeling techniques that can be used when forecasting changes.

The first being Analytical modeling which basically looks at the workloads within an environment and measures the arrival of work into the server. This technique allows an organization to very quickly see the impact of business changes.

The other modeling, but time consuming, technique is Simulation modeling. Simulation modeling basically revolves around duplicating the existing environment and running synthetic or real world transactions at a certain speed to determine the impact of business changes.

Many times and for a number of areas, modeling does not fit into the forecasting of certain components. That is when using trending or stacked bar charts provides the largest value to understand the forecasting of those business changes. These are such as, but not limited to, consolidating servers, looking at the headroom available within a VMware cluster and disk space growth.

Key items many Capacity Managers want to know are:

• Do I need to forecast and manage this server or environment against peaks or averages?
• When are models appropriate for forecasting?
• When are trend and stacked bar charts appropriate forecasting?
• How to show both peaks and averages for a metric on the same chart

I'll be running a webinar on January 12  with a discussion of forecasting techniques which will answer these questions and more.

In the meantime don't miss our free Capacity Management for SAN attached storage webinar,running tomorrow, which discusses ways to assist the storage administrator in the complex task of managing SAN attached storage.

To register for these or any of our webinars http://www.metron-athene.com/training/webinars/webinar_summaries.html
Charles Johnson
Principal Consultant

Make sure that you and your customers have a Happy Holiday.

Yes it’s that time of the year again.  It seems almost everybody is trawling the mall in search of gifts for their loved ones. If they’re not at the mall then they’ll be on the internet, helping retailers to have another record year for online shopping. 

All of this means one thing to IT - more capacity.

As capacity planners we come across some interesting seasonal patterns but nothing seems to strike fear into the IT department as much as the holidays.

The good news is that you have had 12 months to plan for it….

So what interesting things happen at this time of year?

*New Phones!  That’s right, at the top of our gift list are mobile phones.  And what happens?  They sit beneath our trees (or in our cupboards) until suddenly, on the 25^th December, there is a frenzy of activity and everyone wants their phones to work.  Imagine the massive spike for services that support the registration of new sim cards.

* Retail.  This is the month where money is made and boy does that generate a whole load of transactions!  Whether the sale is online or in store the backend of the business feels the strain. You’d better hope that you got it right or those extra staff in the warehouse will be bored!

*Web Pages.  The growth of online retail means the web will be busier than ever this year, what can be better than bargain hunting from the comfort of your own home? Just when you think it’s all over, people log on to spend those vouchers, or look up instructions, or just to avoid playing family games.  Why can’t they just leave IT alone? It’s the holidays!  If you want to avoid unhappy customers, that web page has to be up and running well!

*00:00:00 1^st Jan.  No, your cell will not connect, and your text will be very late.  The spike in calls and texts at this moment is so huge that the only plan is to protect the core services from total failure.

Those people out there experienced in capacity planning will have plenty of data from last year at their disposal and will know what they expect to happen, what headroom they have and what they can cope with (and when to pull up the drawbridge).

What happens if you haven’t planned for it and are now reading this and wondering what to do?

 *  Start monitoring your servers now!  Information is power.  (We have athene® Virtual Appliance that you can download and trial for free http://www.metron-athene.com/_downloads/_virtual_appliance/index.html)

*  Find out what the business expects.  Get on the phone and start talking to your business units about what they expect your customers to do.

* Model it.  Whether that’s simple aggregation and “what if” trends on CPU/Memory/IO or analytical modelling, set about identifying what the expected business workload will do to your servers and transaction response times.  Don’t just model what is expected either. Load up the servers in the model until you know what they can cope with and feed back to the business how much extra they can go over before it will become a problem.

* Contact us.  If you have no plan and you’re wondering where to start, it’s not too late. We’ll be happy to work with you, helping you to see if you can cope with the Holidays this year.

Remember capacity management is not just for Christmas!  Happy Holidays.

Phil Bell
Consultant

Metron at Gartner - Bringing data and information together

We've been dealing with capacity management and an IT landscape that has been rapidly increasing in complexity for the last quarter-century. Our software, consulting and training has helped many companies, in all sectors, manage their IT capacity with a focus now on managing complex, cloud-based environments. 
It will be solutions to this very topic that Metron will be discussing at the Gartner Data Center conference taking place in Las Vegas December 5-8.
At the conference we'll be on hand at Booth 12 to talk visitors through our proposed 3-pronged approach:

athene®, for infrastructure capacity management, data storage and reporting needs

The capture, storage, analysis, and reporting of capacity data is crucial for customers to accurately manage the capacity of resources, services, and applications.  Both cloud providers and cloud customers can benefit from timely, accurate capacity reporting and analysis and can accurately forecast future resource requirements that will continue to satisfy agreed-upon service levels.

athene® also has the capability to report, trend, and alert on data that comes from external sources, such as service level data, transaction data, and any time-series file containing any data valuable to capacity management efforts.

SharePath, for the capture of end-to-end transaction data

If a cloud customer doesn’t know or, worse, can’t quantify the amount of time it takes for transactions to complete, it’s impossible to properly police or enforce service level agreements.  SharePath allows for the capture of end-to-end transaction response time data for all real end-user transactions.  This data can then easily and automatically be imported into athene® for reporting, trending and alerting purposes.  The automation means that a customer won’t have to spend time carefully looking over reported response times for thousands or millions of transactions to ensure SLA compliance.

Integrator Capture Packs, for the capture, storage, reporting, trending, and alerting of data from “hard to reach” data sources

Every company has tools and platforms that store vital numeric data in log files or other sorts of time-series text files.  athene®, via its Integrator, can import any time-series numeric data for reporting, trending, and alerting purposes.

Upon client request and as part of consulting engagements, we have been very active in developing Integrator ‘Capture Packs’ – pre-defined templates that can import popular types of data into the athene® database. 

Integrator Capture Packs have been developed for data coming from the HP Performance Manager, Hyper-V, storage devices, network devices, Apache and IIS web logs, iSeries, and many other data sources.  Best of all, Metron or the athene® user can quickly create custom Capture Packs for their own business data, enabling capacity planning from a business perspective.

Companies have long been looking for a cohesive end to end capacity management solution. Our trilogy brings data and information together enabling Infrastructure planning to move out of the Infrastructure and become end to end planning from the business and user perspective.

We believe our customers are going to love the flexibility that our solutions bring.

If you're unable to catch up with us at Gartner and would like to know more visit our website or contact us.

Andrew Smith

Chief Sales & Marketing Officer