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