Talk to
anyone and they will tell you that use of Cloud computing will continue to grow
through 2012 and beyond. Private and
hybrid Cloud now seem to be getting more attention after the initial excitement
about public Cloud. As logical
extensions of what IT does well – day to day maintenance and support of
applications critical to the business – they are understandable. Public Cloud is still gaining in use as
well. For example there are now some
large businesses trusting to public Cloud for applications such as email.
Whatever the
Cloud implementation, there are challenges for the capacity manager. Shared resources are back, although the
mainframe guys will tell you they never went away. Let’s call it multi-tenanting so it sounds
newer and more exciting. All sorts of
capacity will increasingly be shared across multiple groups of users or
processes. This brings capacity
management activity back to the fore in ensuring that what one person does
won’t have an adverse impact on another.
Share and share alike, workload profiling, understanding business
behaviour patterns and a full view of all resources becomes vital. Sure you can ‘cloud burst’, add in some extra
resource in a hurry. Buy anything in a
hurry of course, and the seller rubs his hands with glee, knowing he can charge
you an inflated price.
All this
means there’s lots of scope for the capacity manager to step up and play a much
more important, more strategic role in provisioning resources to support the
business. The down side is increased
complexity to handle. Dynamic allocation
of resources means tracking and predicting usage is more complex. Hybrid and public Clouds mean that some of
the processing for a given service could be outside your control. Can you measure what is happening?
To meet the
new challenges capacity managers will have to enhance their skills and make
sure they have the right tools at their disposal. You can only manage what you can measure, so
de-stress by making sure your audience knows the constraints on you and do a
good job managing what you can reach.
Good end to end monitoring that sees every transaction will enable you
to at least see where in the processing chain time is being spent. If that is in a public Cloud ‘black hole’
that you can’t reach, at least you will have the evidence that points your
Cloud provider to where they need to look.
If the time is being spent on parts of the processing chain where you
can have a positive impact on provisioning, make sure you have the right drill
down tools to assess issues.
Implementing a tool or approach that enables you to bring in whatever
performance and capacity date is available, irrespective of the source,
maximizes the chances that you can plan effectively and manage any capacity
problems that arise.
The main
thing is not to be put off by having elements of your world outside your direct
control. Dr W Edwards Deming is often
misquoted as saying ‘you can’t manage what you can’t measure’. What he actually said was that many important
things that you need to manage cannot be measured – they must still be managed
however. Cloud computing has many
important entities that the capacity manager needs to manage. Just because you can’t directly measure some
of them doesn’t mean you can’t and shouldn’t include them in your capacity
management thinking as best you can.
On Friday
we’ll look at applications that are already hosted in virtual environments and
how to manage their capacity.
Andrew Smith
Chief Sales & Marketing Officer
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