Maturity, as defined by Wikipedia, is a psychological term used to indicate how a person responds to the circumstances or environment in an appropriate manner. At TeamQuest, we define maturity as the moment when IT views everything from a business point of view, rather than a technical standpoint. The focus is on actions that will benefit the company as a whole.

We’ve entered the nascent stages of understanding how to manage cloud computing and virtual heterogeneous environments. This means management complexity increases since there’s no longer a permanent and exclusive relationship between physical resources and the software that runs on it. IT needs the right people, processes and tools to navigate through the hype to make this work.

Capacity management isn’t the Holy Grail, but it can provide the information you need to make miraculous decisions. The process is simple. Realize where you are now, plan to move ahead, and take the first step toward greater maturity.

Take this quiz to discover where you are now. Once you get your score, review this 8-page paper. Then take the steps necessary to move to the next stage of maturity. The majority of companies are between stages 1 and 2 (i.e., reactive and proactive).

If that’s good enough, then continue on. If you’re looking to accurately weigh costs against benefits and risks, measure process efficiency and effectiveness, and link IT services to business processes, then it’s time to get to work. Get in touch with us or leave a comment.

Of course, if you’re already providing value to the business, let us know how you’re doing it. In fact, tell everyone how you’re doing it. We all want to respond to business needs in an appropriate manner.

I’m attending the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas this week, and I’m hearing a lot about virtualization and cloud. In fact, I’ve heard analysts joke (I think) that they are required to mention “cloud” at least once in every presentation. Here are some of things I’m hearing analyst say in regards to virtualization:

“Nearly 50% of all installed x86 server workloads are now running in virtual machines.”

“In 2012, more virtual machines will be deployed than in 2001 through 2009 put together.”

“Virtualization is one of the most critical components being used to increase densities and vertically scale data centers.”

“The more you virtualize, the more physical layer problems you introduce.”

These are the types of comments that have me so excited about TeamQuest’s acquisition of Performance Surveyor. If you can’t manage capacity successfully in virtual and cloud environments, you run the risk of creating unwanted downtime or just plain waste resources and money that virtualization and cloud computing promise to deliver.

Performance Surveyor is trusted in environments with more than 40,000 servers, tens of thousands of virtual servers, and hundreds of thousands of network elements. All of this scalability, with the focus solely on providing service-centric virtual and cloud computing management and optimization.

Listen to a podcast that discusses the impact of Performance Surveyor.

Read more about Performance Surveyor here and here.

Follow me at @jwia on Twitter, TeamQuest at @TeamQuest_Corp, and keep up with all of the real time information that is flowing from the Gartner Data Center Conference by following the hashtag #GartnerDC.

Joe

It’s official! TeamQuest purchased Performance Surveyor. You can read about the acquisition in the news release. If you want to hear what this means for TeamQuest and the company’s plans to help IT optimize dynamic environments, listen here.

We’re putting the control in your hands. You can own a completely vendor agnostic, capacity management solution.

We’re changing the rules. You can immediately increase your capacity management maturity without a massive implementation.

We’re keeping it simple. You can completely replace your underlying infrastructure management toolsets and continue to do automated capacity management with our solution.

Of course, we’re excited about this news, but we’d like to hear your thoughts on the role capacity management plays in your dynamic environments. How do you realize the benefits of capacity management in your IT environment?

Our latest release has improvements for VMware, PowerVM, support for LDAP and Active Directory, and much more. This particular update includes features suggested by 26 customers. Take a look at the release flyer for more information. If you are a customer, log into the support area and download the release notes for all the details.

Cloud computing has rapidly and dramatically changed the model for distributing and managing services. With this new model, many benefits and savings are achieved, but it also comes with challenges when it comes to developing the right strategy that fits your organizational needs.

Many IT organizations do not fully understand the potential conflicts of a cloud environment or lack the visibility into the performance of the application or service, according to the a 2011 Forrester Consulting study.

When it comes to managing capacity and performance in the cloud, many IT organizations are not taking full advantage of the benefits that can be provided by establishing a good capacity management process and using their capacity management tools to gain the full benefits.

HOW CAPACITY PLANNING CAN HELP IN MY CLOUD COMPUTING?

 1.    Planning your cloud environment

Planning is essential in any process.  Provisioning in the cloud too quickly can lead to many pitfalls, like losing total control of your IT process, overestimating your cloud capabilities and exponentially increasing the cost of your cloud initiative.  Planning will also speed up the release of new IT services into the cloud.

“Because the cost of cloud computing is directly linked to resource usage, planning the capacity needed to process a workload in the cloud is directly linked to an estimate of cost and consequently to an informed decision about the choices that are now available to IT.”
The Key to Cloud and Virtual Computing – Managing and Planning Capacity in 2011 and beyond – Forrester Consulting

Keep in mind the following when planning:

1)    What services will you offer in the cloud?  What is the initial sizing needed? Do not be tempted to add everything.  You need to understand your applications and your computing resources in the cloud.  Collecting performance data will enable you to understand the resource consumption and provide an estimate to the initial sizing of your cloud environment.

2)    How will it be managed?  Visibility to performance metrics is vital, especially if you are on a public or hybrid cloud.  At the end of the day, these are physical resources that need to me monitored and managed.  If you have a hosting solution, how will you have visibility of these performance metrics?

3)     How will I measure Service Levels?  Whether you are in a private cloud or using a hosting provider, you need to monitor and report on your agreed service levels.  This means, you must have some visibility of the IT service or application, or at least, have information about response time from a user’s perspective.  Otherwise, if you don’t measure these, you are not providing business value.

4)    How will my business change over time?  Planning for spikes, growth, and seasonal changes before you add services and application to the cloud.  According to Forrester, “Workloads evolve with time and business events. Performance monitoring, linked to resource allocation, lets IT operations take advantage of the flexibility offered by virtualization and cloud computing by providing a ‘‘throttle’’ that will constantly adapt resources to the workload as a function of expected performances.”

TeamQuest can assist in your planning by providing decision support for determining which services should be relegated to the cloud and how much of those services should run on the cloud. A careful cost and performance analysis of various options will be required.  TeamQuest Model can assist with your “what-if” scenarios that can prepare you be ready when you encounter spikes, sudden growth and seasonal changes.

2.    Measuring Business Value

Measuring business value means you will have SLAs (service-level agreements) with your cloud provider, setting expectations and responsibilities for both parties and negotiating any penalties for failing to meet those expectations.  But you cannot rely on the hosting partner to provide these metrics for you.

TeamQuest can help you measure the business value by tracking and reporting service performance against SLAs on an ongoing basis on things like response time and throughput service levels.  It will also improve things like mean time between failures (availability), improve IT efficiency and reduce potential impact to the business due to unplanned outages.  All adding to your goal of increasing business value.

3.    Monitoring the Performance

Going beyond measuring business value, you should also measure IT specific metrics in your private cloud and public clouds.  On a private cloud you can monitor your resources and create alerts that can speed restoration by easily drilling down to pinpoint the causes of incidents.

“A strong capacity management process is considered by a majority of respondents as the best approach to avoid performance issues in a virtualized environment”
The key to Cloud and Virtual Computing – Managing and Planning Capacity in 2011 and beyond – Forrester Consulting

You can become proactive by creating a Linear Trending Analysis that takes selected parameter values, calculates a trend line for the selected parameter, and then projects that trend line into the future, thus potentially avoiding a future disaster. All of this is automated and it gets evaluated on a specific schedule (usually every 24 hours).

In a public cloud, you can measure response times and the experience from a customer’s perspective.  You can automate this process to run on a schedule, let’s say every 10 minutes, and alert you on any thresholds you have applied.

4.    Continuous Service Improvement

Change is a constant in IT, and the cloud is no exception.  In fact, because of the complexity nature of the cloud, with a mix of virtual, physical, applications, services, public, private and scalability agility, the change is rapid and competitive.

In order to compete, your cloud initiative should continually improve and re-invent your service offerings.   By doing so, your demand will be affected and the right capacity, at the right time, at the right cost mix will be essential for meeting your desired business goals.
Continuous Service Improvement should start immediately after your cloud implementation is done, not in 9 months.  SLAs are measured, gap analysis conducted, identification of potential risks and efficiency of the services and process must be an ongoing process.  This continuous process is how we gain IT maturity.

The TeamQuest CMIS provides the server infrastructure performance and usage information needed for the IT staff to perform these assessments and assuring a measurable improvement of your services.

As you can see, TeamQuest’s suite of performance and capacity analysis tools can add excellent value to getting the right cloud computing environment in your business.  These set of tools are easy to use, flexible and satisfy the needs of capacity planners, service level managers, performance analysts or predictive modelers in assisting with the cloud configuration, reducing performance issues and reducing all budgets across in your IT organization.

Last month, I watched this video from Kathryn Schulz who is a “wrongologist”. What she said caught my attention about how we react from being right or wrong and the emotions and beliefs that go along with it.

Then I asked myself these questions:

1. How can this relate to IT?
2. What can we learn from being wrong?
3. Who do we blame when something goes wrong?

Kathryn talks about how the aviation industry got it right after many years.  Let’s face it, this is an industry where mistakes are not acceptable.  Imagine you are about to board a plane, and they tell you the availability of the plane is 99.5% or the capacity of the plane is over by 20%.  Would you feel comfortable?  The changes and decisions they make on a daily basis have great consequences for all of their passengers.

The aviation industry realized that they had to move away from blaming an individual when something went wrong.  Individuals make mistakes.  It is inevitable.  So they figured out that the answer to something going wrong was not an individual’s fault.  Mistakes are great information and an opportunity to learn and improve.  So what the aviation industry decided to focus on was their system/process.  Where did the system/process fail and why?  We might not be able to get perfect people, but we can definitely improve the process, so that mistakes (by people or IT components) are minimized.

How can this relate to IT?  

IT obviously does not want to be wrong.  But it seems that when something goes wrong in IT, there is finger pointing from Developers to System Administrators, Database to Application Developers and everyone else blaming the Network group!

Processes and Best Practices like ITSO (IT Service Optimization) can help minimize those mistakes by ensuring that the business requirements are understood for all IT services, ensuring risk levels are considered and prioritized and planning for future scenarios and how they will affect services, applications and servers.

As the process matures, we provide better value to the business, better alignment and better risk assessment.

What can we learn from being wrong?

Danish scientist and Nobel laureate Niels Bohr defined an expert as “A person that has made every possible mistake within his or her field.”  So being wrong should be taken as an opportunity to learn that time and effort will lead us to…well…being right!!
In ITSO, there is an unknown sixth part of the process – Continual Service Improvement. When you complete the 5th step, go back to the 1st step.  Many variables in IT that affect services are in constant flux. There is a continuous need to realign IT processes to the changing business needs.  This continuous process is how we gain IT maturity.

Who do we blame when something goes wrong?

We can blame people or even computers/operating systems/application.  But that approach will only lead us to staying in a reactive mode, as people and IT components will eventually be wrong (they are not perfect).  For example, an excellent IT operator might be up all night sick and the next day might not be 100% alert and could make a mistake.  A disk, which has been working fine for years, all of a sudden might fail.  There are no guarantees for any of these two scenarios.  Following a process (whether it’s a written process or an application transaction process) can minimize – and in some cases – avoid the mistake completely.  A disk can be measured, diagnosed and also we could have a contingency plan in case the disk fails.

IT will make mistakes.  Take those mistakes as an opportunity to learn to be right. It is the only path to maturity.  Remember that IT maturity is a journey, not a destination. Enjoy the ride!

Senior Executive Rich Rodgers explained how Verizon Wireless met customer demand for the iPhone launch without any performance issues. “It’s the classic model of IT,” he said. “You work really, really hard and the most you can hope for is that nobody noticed what you did.”

Rodgers’ 7-minute video highlights how IT worked with the busines during the Verizon Wireless iPhone launch. The customer experience was great:

1. No slowdowns
2. Happy customers
3. Record sales numbers

“We accomplished record numbers with zero performance issues. We didn’t have any customer complaints,” said Rodgers.

Find more information on the Verizon Wireless iPhone launch here.

We are pleased to announce that Verizon Wireless has been awarded the 2011 IT Service Optimization (ITSO) Award. Verizon Wireless recently launched Apple’s iPhone 4 on the nation’s fastest and most advanced 4G network. By using TeamQuest software to optimize their IT services, the launch was a complete success.

“The launch of iPhone 4 for Verizon Wireless showcased how we utilize TeamQuest tools to enhance and optimize systems. Through continuous testing and strategic planning, we accomplished a record number of device sales without incurring any critical performance issues or outages,” said Rich Rodgers, Verizon Wireless Executive Director of IT Systems Engineering, Integration and Finance.

Can you hear me now?

Previous ITSO Award winner Law School Administration Council (LSAC) established an IT Service Optimization framework in tandem with TeamQuest software and has been able to streamline its infrastructure to completely fulfill its service demands. LSAC successfully negotiated its peak activity period with no service shortfalls, while adding new services at the same time.

ITSO Award nominees are judged on a variety of criteria:

1. Adoption: Implementation and use of TeamQuest software and best practices
2. Impact: The benefits obtained from implementing TeamQuest software and best practices
3. Innovation: The way the company uses TeamQuest software and best practices
4. Results: Concrete improvement and measurable change

Verizon Wireless implementation of TeamQuest software is a shining example of how to use sound capacity management people, process and tools to bring value to the organization.

Join us in congratulating Verizon Wireless on their achievement!

Today we are making available a maintenance update that includes many improvements to TeamQuest Performance Software. We routinely produce releases like this, providing significant updates, corrections and enhancements to our software. It’s just one way we deliver on our promise to provide value to customers.

This particular release includes over 80 improvements to the software that debuted with Release 10.3 late last year. 45 of the features contained in this release were specifically requested by our customers to help them in their day-to-day efforts to manage IT performance and capacity.

To see a summary of the release contents, check out our new release flyer. For details, customers can check the various product release notes in the Support area of the TeamQuest Web site. (Customer login required.)

The rush to virtualize everything NOW has been in vogue for a couple of years. But warning flags were raised at TTS by keynote speaker Leonid Grinshpan, a technical consultant with Oracle. He laid out graphically how much of a performance penalty there can be due to virtualization.

“There are a lot of problems being experienced in the field with virtualization with enterprise applications,” said Grinshpan.

Big companies like Thompson Reuters, for example, even have policy against virtualization their applications due to performance issues.  On that company’s major application, Virtual Machines (VMs) impose an additional overhead which can reduce performance by 15 to 20 percent, and disk I/O sequential read performance can degrade by 15% - 70% depending on the architecture.

He modeled an example of three servers running two applications. When not virtualized, response time was always below the corporate standard of less than eight seconds and typically less than four seconds. Modeling with TeamQuest also highlighted that one server could be dropped and that performance would remain acceptable for both applications. When virtualized, however, the transaction rate soared for one app to more than 30 seconds. This, said Grinshpan, was due to VMs resulting in longer queuing times. He went into detail on queuing theory and showed specific numbers to back it up. All of this will be covered in a white paper that will be posted on the TeamQuest site within a few weeks. His message: VMs cause more CPU utilization and this has to be taken into account.

“Use TeamQuest to model performance and provide the right estimates in a VM environment,” he said.  “For enterprise applications, capacity planning will never be dead.”

One way to address the sprawl of virtualization, said Rey Rios of TeamQuest, was to become far more agile by moving up the stages of the Capacity Management Maturity Model. He recommended the audience assess themselves against the model by visiting the TeamQuest site and completing a self assessment.  That shows which level your organization is currently at and what needs to be done to move up to the next level.

According to Gartner, 60 percent of U.S. companies are at the reactive stage. To move upwards, said Rios, they need the combination of the right tools as well as the right processes and a lot of hard work.

“It is not easy to jump from one level to another as it takes time and effort,” said Rios. “Do it sensibly in small steps. As you see the quick wins, everyone gets on board.”

Ron Potter and Jon Hill from TeamQuest discussed another aspect of agility in a virtual world – the implementation of the Capacity Management Information System (CMIS). It forms a single book of record for all capacity and performance related information for IT infrastructure components

“If you build a CMIS, people and tools know where to go to get information,” said Potter.