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

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!

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!

In listening to eBay’s Mazen Rawashdeh and Gartner’s Dave Cappuccio in their Gartner Data Center Conference session discussing how eBay solved their infrastructure and data center challenges, a few things stood out to me:

• A linear relationship between capacity and cost is not a sustainable IT Operations model. If you cannot look at historical data, understand your current capacity status, and be able to plan for future capacity investments, you will have a tough time keeping your costs at a reasonable rate while providing adequate capacity to support all of the services you provide to the business.
• Metrics drive behavior. Think about it…accountability cannot happen without measurement.
• If you are unable to innovate and keep up with the changes around you, you will fail. This is not only good business but also a valuable life lesson.
• Start with the why, not the what. Help your teams understand WHY they are doing what they are doing.
• People, process, and tools are the foundation for driving change, efficiency, and ultimately generating revenue.

So, what’s your plan to break the linear correlation between capacity and cost?

Joe

Well, I finally heard the word that I’ve known to be true in pretty much every emerging data center technology that has come about in the past 20 years of TeamQuest’s existence. “Sprawl.” But now it’s turned from “virtual sprawl” to “cloud sprawl.” In sitting in one of the key notes yesterday, I heard Gartner’s Ray Paquet enunciate the words that make my skin crawl. Sprawl!

The only cure for technology sprawl are the fundamentals of our IT Service Optimization (or ITSO, hence the name of this blog) process. A combination of capacity management people, process, and tools is the cure. With the advent of recent technology like virtualization and cloud computing, people thought capacity would not be a problem. But, the fact remains that data center space along with power and cooling is still one of the top priorities of CIOs across the globe. Yet people thought capacity management was dead, right? Wrong.

If you’d like to keep up with the rest of the Gartner Data Center Conference, you can follow the #GartnerDC hashtag, follow me at @jwia on Twitter, or keep checking this blog for updates. Oh, and you can always join our LinkedIn Group.

All for now,

Joe

While many of you in the US will be thinking and talking about turkey and stuffing next week, TeamQuest will be talking about Capacity Management Maturity. Our very own Per Bauer, TeamQuest EMEA Technical Account Manager, is presenting at the Gartner Data Center & IT Operations Summit in London.

As greater demands are placed on IT for efficiency and productivity, it is becoming more important for IT organizations to adopt more sophisticated methods; Capacity Management processes must become more “mature”. We will help you assess your current maturity level and also guide you to a way forward.

So if you are planning to attend, take time on Monday, November 22, at 15:00 to take in Per’s presentation.

Even if you aren’t attending, you can learn more about Capacity Management Maturity at any time.

And don’t forget to stop by booth #7. See you there!

Many of us who have been involved with Capacity Management for some time have experienced the situation of not being able to recreate past work. We built a plan and then six months later, have a need to measure progress against predictions. The only problem is that we can’t recreate the original results. I have spent hours trying to figure out what went wrong with my calculations, only to find out that I had changed my process to create the report, missed a parameter or two and used a different reporting tool against someone else’s data. After being embarrassed a time or two, I took steps to avoid those mistakes.

Well now you don’t have to worry about those reporting and data disconnects. There is an ITIL Version 3 concept, called a Capacity Management Information System or CMIS, which can make life easier for all of us by helping to prevent problems such as these. An upgrade to the previous ITIL Capacity Management Database (CDB), the CMIS not only stores a wide variety of infrastructure usage and performance data, it includes a set of reporting tools. The CMIS is the book of record for all Capacity Management usage and performance data so no questioning who collected what data and how. A common reporting tool means you don’t have to worry about different reporting algorithms or distribution methodologies which can skew results. Operating with a consistent set of reporting tools and synchronized data, you will get the same answer every time, even if it’s six months from now.

Want to know more? Read our new CMIS white paper or contact your friendly TeamQuest representative to find out how TeamQuest’s implementation of a CMIS can help you maintain consistency and uniformity in your reporting.

Until the next post,

Ron

I’m sure many of you are gearing up for your travels to Louisville for itSMF USA Fusion 10. Get ready to plug in and rock the house! We all know everything changes, and with the flood disaster that changed the venue from Nashville, it seems that Fusion 10 will be the perfect setting to dig into all of the new and exciting changes in the wonderful world of ITSM.

As you are heading to the great state of Kentucky, I thought we could give you a little reading material for the trip. TeamQuest is inviting you to see how you can Join the Journey to capacity management maturity. Lower costs, improve service quality and increase IT productivity by moving to more mature Capacity Management tools and processes.

What level is your organization? Chaotic, Reactive, Proactive, Service, or Value? Let us know:

Most businesses today are in Reactive or Proactive stages. To take the next step and reach the Service stage, homogeneous monitoring across heterogeneous platforms and technologies in combination with predictive modeling becomes crucial. This also prepares you for the ultimate level, the Value stage.

For more information, we invite you to visit teamquest.com or you will have the opportunity at itSMF Fusion 10 to talk one-on-one with a TeamQuest capacity management professional by stopping by booth 1921.

And don’t forget to follow us on Twitter, we’ll be tweeting updates throughout the event.

We look forward to talking with you!

One of the more common complaints I hear is the issue of conflicting reports. Two different people using different tools to report against data from the same time period arrive at different answers. The situation drives senior management crazy and makes them question the credibility of both parties.

The problem? The people probably use different reporting tools against independently collected data, probably with different collection parameters. Some data may be averaged over the entire collection period where others may be an accumulation of 30-second data points within that same collection period. One may be using a statistical analysis program, the other a spreadsheet.

The solution? Perhaps a Capacity Management Information System (CMIS) is the answer. It is a database or databases containing all capacity management information, including service level and business statistics. All data in the CMIS is synchronized so collection parameters and periods are consistent across the enterprise. The CMIS also has a reporting element to ensure that two different people reporting on the same data with the same parameters will arrive at the same results every time.

Want more information? Watch this blog for the announcement of my upcoming white paper on the subject.

Until the next post

Ron