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?

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.

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

We recently had the opportunity to listen to Charles Babcock, editor-at-large of InformationWeek, speak about the much discussed topic of cloud computing at the TeamQuest Technology Summit. Babcock reinforced a couple of themes that we have been saying all along during the advent of cloud computing.

Cloud computing is not a revolution, but as Mr. Babcock terms it, a “convergence” of several technologies used together in a unique way. When it comes right down to it, a cloud environment still consists of traditional compute fabric we all have grown accustom to in the past several years with virtualization in the forefront. The main twist to the technology of cloud computing is the method of delivery to the end user.

Listen to the Clip: Cloud Computing Evolution vs. Revolution

We need to avoid “compulsive over-provisioning,”  which is something that we have seen in a majority of IT organizations in early stages of Capacity Management Maturity. Joining the journey to becoming a mature IT organization takes time and effort and a key component is understanding the current state of capacity coupled with forecasted capacity requirements. Having strong capacity management processes in place allow you to focus on bringing value to the business versus reacting to performance problems and incidents that arise due to capacity issues.

Listen to the Clip: Compulsive Over-prosivisioning

I like the idea of using the cloud to dodge problems with over-provisioning. I should point out though, that contrary to popular belief, tapping cloud computing still requires careful performance and capacity management. To achieve IT Service Optimization using the cloud, you need to analyze the financial aspects as well as performance, capacity, and risk when determining how, how much, and when to use cloud services. Keep in mind, the cloud is more complicated than any one of the technologies that converge to comprise it. As you prepare for it, you’ll want to tap the right performance and capacity tools to ensure that cloud projects successfully deliver business value.

If you are interested in learning more from Mr. Babcock regarding cloud computing, check out his book, Management Strategies for the Cloud Revolution. You might also be interested in this white paper from TeamQuest: Capacity Management Ensures Success for Enterprise Cloud Consumers.