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?

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!

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

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

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

When I read the eWeek article entitled, “How to Manage Capacity in Virtualized Environments” I finished wanting more. Actually, I finished realizing TeamQuest already has more to offer.

Explaining the ITIL definition of Capacity Management is great, but how about expanding a bit further and drilling down into the details - from a Capacity Management perspective. Since the author, Rob Smoot, is a Group Product Marketing Manager at VMware, let’s focus on VMware.

TeamQuest offers scalable, agentless performance data collection for both VMware ESX and ESXi hypervisors and:

• vSphere 4
• AIX PowerVM, including LPARs and WPARs
• Solaris Containers, Zones, and LDOMs.

TeamQuest Model, one tool in our suite, can predict performance in advance, help to optimize services and avoid costly bottlenecks altogether. We can find the least-expensive, best-performing configurations for P2V consolidation, ensuring that service levels will be met. IT managers can quickly determine the best way to allocate resources to VMware guests. And unlike other tools, TeamQuest Model understands response times inside virtual machines.

Take a look at a previous blog post entitled, “It’s CRAZY to Run Just One App Per Virtual Server.” Ron Potter, TeamQuest’s Manager of Best Practices outlines the benefits of running multiple applications on a virtual machine and the planning needed to ensure you have the right configuration for the right situation. In fact, Potter takes this a step further in his white paper, “Grab More Post-virtualization Savings.”

Also, check out the press release on TeamQuest’s VMware capabilities, or our website on managing a virtual environment, or for some real nitty gritty details, see our white paper entitled, “Managing a Virtual Computing Environment - How TeamQuest Supports VMware’s Virtual Machines.”

Remember virtualization is not a cure-all. Capacity Management improves your virtualization tools. It’s a discipline that, when used with the right tools, allows you to get the most from your virtualization efforts.

If you would like to further the discussion on how to truly manage capacity in virtualized environments, don’t hesitate to contact us directly or leave a comment below. We look forward to hearing from you!

Demands for more services are increasing and high performance and reliability are expected, yet budgets, labor and floor space are all being constrained. I guess nobody said running a data center was easy.

The need for increased efficiency and reliability points to capacity management processes. And like anything else, you have to crawl before you walk, but the value of capacity management practices is there. So what’s it take to adopt more mature processes?

TeamQuest has released our Capacity Management Maturity Model that identifies different levels of IT management competency.

 

Following the lead of Gartner’s IT Management Process Maturity Model, we’ve drilled down even further to highlight the levels of Capacity Management maturity specifically.

After all, moving to mature Capacity Management tools and processes lowers costs, improves service quality and increases IT productivity since staff can focus on the most important duties rather than fight fires.

Take a look at our latest white paper entitled, Introducing a Capacity Management Maturity Model. Let us know what you think! Post your comments below.

Ten years ago it was all about data collection and working to get good performance from infrastructure components. Toward the end of the last decade the emphasis changed for the better, with IT management tools providing more of a service point of view rather than looking at things from a strictly technical infrastructure point of view.

So what’s next? Jeane-Pierre Garbani at Forrester Research recently wrote about “The Next Decade,” summarizing the progress we are making in the IT management software industry.

Business management looks at IT from a value perspective. They want to know, what business benefits am I getting for my IT dollar? Is my IT organization providing me with the ideal value-to-cost ratio? IT organizations are going to have to focus more on that value-to-cost ratio, says Garbani. I think he is right.

IT management and IT management tools vendors need to focus on optimizing that value-to-cost ratio, helping to ensure that business benefits are realized at the lowest overall cost. As Garbani says, IT management vendors need to position their tools “in the global context of the ‘IT Enterprise’ and show how they will contribute to internal IT optimization.”

What are your thoughts? Click the comments link below.

What were people asking about at CMG this year? Questions varied from workloads, automated reporting and TeamQuest Model, to collecting metrics in AIX and implementing a public cloud.

Read this post from TeamQuest Technology Summit 2009 on TeamQuest software and AIX.

While I can’t go into great detail, I can say that several visitors got what they wanted - a complete answer.

While not known for marketing its services, TeamQuest fielded a few questions about IT Service Optimization (ITSO). Customers saw an ITSO demo or two from Enterprise Performance Specialist Rey Rios along with capacity management tools that complement the ITSO process.

CMG was a great opportunity to continue supporting the individuals and teams responsible for ensuring efficient and scalable IT service delivery to the business.

BTW, stay tuned for more information on TeamQuest Performance Software in the Cloud.