Capacity Management: Top 5 Trends for 2012 - Who Killed Capacity? (1 of 5)

Keep an eye on the Top Ten Capacity Killers

Hi and welcome to the first of my series of five blogs about the top 5 capacity management trends for 2012.  Thanks to Frank Days and the guys at Correlsense, our application performance management partner, for the original thinking on this.

We start with the good old Service Level Agreement or SLA.  Over-provisioning, green IT initiatives and the economy have put more emphasis for capacity managers on cost and value together, ‘cost value analysis’, not just on budget.  It’s not going to be about what something costs any more, it’s going to be about what value it gives to the business.  To understand the ‘cost’ part of that equation fully, a good capacity manager will increasingly need to look outside traditional capacity areas and hold a more holistic view of capacity to keep his seniors happy.  Costs and service levels across traditional processing areas such as network, processor and disk need to be considered together with environmental factors such as space and power to get a true understanding of the value of an asset. 

Adding in SLA considerations enables you to understand the ‘value’ side of the equation.  Buying resource to provide a quality of service far in excess of what the business really needs could mean you are providing little value.  One can’t make such judgements unless the capacity manager has gone out, found and understood what service level is acceptable to the business.  This means an end to end approach to capacity management across an application or service is needed so that nothing is missed.

Of course the ever-increasing complexities of new application environments make this more and more challenging.  The ability to reconfigure resources in real time means that traditional sizing approaches such as load testing before an application goes live are no longer sufficient on their own.  Once an application is live, an end to end perspective is needed so that you learn what is good and bad from a user perspective, not an infrastructure perspective.  Wherever the problem is, you then need quality tools and techniques to analyse and plan in those areas.  Some old fashioned rules still apply.  The majority of any short term performance issues are probably caused by a very small percentage of transactions.  Being able to keep an eye on the ‘Top 10’ bad boy transactions is therefore critical – manage those and chances are your users will be smiling.

 On Friday we’ll look at virtualization and capacity management.  Thought you had migration of physical to virtual sorted?  Think again!

Andrew Smith

Chief Sales & Marketing Officer