The afternoon sessions at TTS were very informative. Rey Rios gave a great session on ITSO and ITIL. He discussed the differences, and similarities, between ITIL V2, V3 and ITSO. Then he explained how TeamQuest products supported the frameworks and best practices.

Mark Manness and Scott Johnson followed Rey. They discussed the upcoming changes to the VMWare agent and TeamQuest Model as it relates to modeling VMWare platforms and guests. It was very informative and all are awaiting the releases.

Leonid Grinshpan of Oracle discussed multi-tiered application sizing. It was great presentation. Not only did he give us insight into modeling Oracle, he discussed step-by-step processes on how to build prototyping models without and system data, how to validate them and apply what-if scenarios. I thought he did a great job of showing us how we can prototype new applications before they are built.

TTS seems to get better every year and this year is no exception.

Until the next time…

Ron

Jacques Lehoullier, senior architect for product selection at ING Canada (soon to be known as Intact Financial Corporation) gave a breakout session on how to expand AIX capacity from a fixed physical base. He laid out the fact that rapid growth led to increased hardware costs, higher logistical costs and delays due to floor space, electrical and cooling issues. The data center had literally ran out of space.

The company investigated virtualization as a solution, but worried about the risks due to having many applications running on one physical server. It upgraded from two IBM P595 servers of 64 CPUs each to four P590+ with 16 CPUs each in a virtual environment consisting of four CPU pools.

IT at the company consulted with Gartner Group which recommended TeamQuest. This helped the company simplify reporting — from�as much as a month to gather the performance and capacity data down to seconds — and enabled the company to decommission several old servers despite adding 100 more logical partitions.

Craig.

I’m here for the 8^th annual TeamQuest Technology Summit (TTS). Despite the economy there has been a good turnout with everyone in a good mood. It’s hard to be otherwise here in Savannah, Georgia. Blue skies and light sea breezes make for a wonderful, relaxed environment to discuss Capacity Management topics.

The conference kicked off with a welcome by President and CEO Jerred Ruble. He brought people up to date on TeamQuest happenings since the last meeting. He also awarded the IT Service Optimization Award to Law School Admission Council (LSAC).

Bruce Bachman, LSAC CIO, was here to accept the award. It was well-deserved as LSAC made huge strides in improving services over the past several years. Congratulations to Bruce, Jerry Goldman, Technical Services leader, and all the people at LSAC who worked so hard to make their success a reality!!

Some LSAC highlights:

• Used ITIL/ITSO best practices to manage risks
• Beat Recovery Time Objective goal by 12 hours
• Beat Recovery Point Objective by 3.5 hours
• Project finished ahead of time and under budget

JP Garbani of Forrester had a great presentation. He spoke on strategies to improve IT efficiency. He covered some history as to how we got here from a Capacity Management perspective. He then discussed how technology complexity has increased and covered how this complexity impacts the business. He stressed the point that we can no longer afford to be reactive as too many staff productivity and customer revenue dollars are lost during outages. He closed by saying we need to have predictive processes to minimize outages, reducing costs and improving customer service; something very important and timely in these trying economic times. It was refreshing to hear him tout some of the very same ITSO principles we have been advocating over the years.

Well, I’m off to the next session.

Until the next time…

Ron

We Capacity Planning managers expect and receive information from wide audiences within our organizations. These people have busy schedules just like us. One best practice I have observed over the years is the use of common courtesy. When someone, especially in the business area, gives me information that I need to complete a piece of work, I make it a point to thank them. I let them know I appreciate them taking the time from their busy schedule to get this for me.

What I have found over the years is that the next time I approach that individual with an information request; I get a much warmer and more cooperative response. Many times those people provide additional information that helps provide more accurate predictions of the future.  

A simple “Thank You!” helps strengthen business relationships and makes it easier to get the information we need to be successful; both personally and organizationally.

Try it. I think you will be pleased with the results.

Until the next time…

Ron