This entry is one in a series of Top 10 lessons learned by Ron Potter in his previous job as the Director of Capacity Planning at a Fortune 100 health insurance provider.

Relationships Matter

Whether you realize it or not, building relationships are key to your success. People work together better when it isn’t just another faceless person behind that email or speakerphone. I have made it a point to meet many of my business and IT co-workers. I have participated in company events such as golf tournaments, baseball game outings and fund-raising activities. Participation in activities such as those helps build better working relationships and makes our jobs easier.

Now many of you might perceive this as playing politics and find that distasteful. Politics is not the goal here. In many cases, communication breakdowns occur because we do not know or understand the person originating the request or information and misinterpret it. As a result we go down the wrong road and it usually isn’t caught until late in the service delivery process. When we know each other better, we work together better. Communications disconnects are rare because we know the parties involved and more clearly understand their positions and needs.  Whether you realize it or not, we treat people we know differently. That personal familiarity makes a difference because IT is complex and requires teamwork to be successful. Relationships create those bonds and are needed to more efficiently and accurately complete our day-to-day work.

Until the next post!

Ron

How’s your Tetris game? Looks like that maddening game is a good analogy for dealing with demanding workloads – much like what you should expect when managing today’s virtualized environments.

Estimation, analytical modeling and synthetic load testing are the three best ways to predict workload capacity requirements. Up front planning can help you efficiently manage those workloads.

Of the three options mentioned above, you should have a good understanding of what will work best in your environment (virtual and physical, homogeneous and heterogeneous, simple and complex). Remember, managing your environment is part of your journey to simplifying your work.

Read an excerpt from the white paper below and check it out for yourself.

Tetris-like blocks symbolize the irregularities among different workloads. A simple workload with a moderate need for resources would be represented by a basic two-piece block. Higher needs for resources and higher complexity would cause the block to expand in various directions.

The larger and less symmetric the blocks get, the harder it is to combine them. An inability to combine the blocks translates into workloads that are starved for resources and can’t be migrated to another host. All of a sudden, two of the key mechanisms that enable flexibility in virtualized environments become unusable. And even if you were able to combine them, large asymmetric blocks will most likely lead to white space fragmentation and lower resources utilization than you calculated and planned for.

White paper

Is this something you’ve dealt with? Let me know which option worked best in your environment and why?

Enjoy the journey.

Vernon