Friday, 1 February 2013

Capacity Management: Guided Practitioner Satnav - Service priorities and categorization (6 of 17)

If every service is treated the same, then gold-plated solutions are provided for unimportant services. These come at a cost, and the money could certainly be better used elsewhere.

Most sites introduce some form of priority for their services, but not many use those priorities to determine as many levels of services and costs as they would for levels of services on a flight or sizes of clothing.
Six seems to be the magic number, from SS, S, M, L, XL and XXL, or in flights: private, first, business, premium, coach and economy.  So for ITSM services the levels could be diamond, platinum, gold, silver, bronze and tin. 

Related levels of criticality, capacity headroom degradation, failover degradation, performance degradation and continuity levels can be defined in terms that make sense for the particular platform and environment. 
This approach can be extended across the entire ITSM spectrum.

This mapping can also be carried forward to the resource level, with the scale of resources available to each level of service being allocated. 

Clearly with virtual resources, the same approach can be used with reference to quotas, guarantees and caps. 
The interpretation varies across platforms but in essence there are three main areas these days, with mainframe, *NIX and Wintel.  (Maybe soon to be joined by Android tablets and smartphones.)
Each domain will have its own mechanisms and available options, but if they are defined then the objective of cost-effective computing can be more readily achieved.
I’ll be continuing with a look at ‘Who do I need to travel with?’ on Monday...

In the meantime there's a chance for one person to win a signed copy of my Capacity Management book (referred to in the first blog of this series)Simply subscribe to our blog or YouTube Channel,Like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn between 31st January and 15th March inclusive to be entered in to our drawing.
Like, follow or subscribe to 3 media or more and receive an additional free entry.

Only one entry per person per media is valid and no cash alternative is available.

The winner will be notified and published after the drawing on 29th March 2013.

Good Luck!
Adam Grummitt
Distinguished Engineer


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