Today we are making available a maintenance update that includes many improvements to TeamQuest Performance Software. We routinely produce releases like this, providing significant updates, corrections and enhancements to our software. It’s just one way we deliver on our promise to provide value to customers.

This particular release includes over 80 improvements to the software that debuted with Release 10.3 late last year. 45 of the features contained in this release were specifically requested by our customers to help them in their day-to-day efforts to manage IT performance and capacity.

To see a summary of the release contents, check out our new release flyer. For details, customers can check the various product release notes in the Support area of the TeamQuest Web site. (Customer login required.)

Enterprise Performance Specialist John Seifert recently spoke to performance analysts and capacity planners at CMG about the chart types and functions available in TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer and Reporter.

The three main benefits from the software include the ability to:
Align performance analysis and reporting with business and IT services
Group and manage IT resources across the enterprise
Show and report on relationships within the enterprise

The best illustration he provided was of a VMware report (slide 60), which showed an array of ways to convey information, analyze data, and present performance/capacity data in an effective way. This is the kind of information that presents itself well to management.

Yes, the audience saw the numerous chart types such as table, line, pie, area, heat map, and others. Seifert explained the pros and cons of each and shared his favorites. He did the same with the chart functions.

An interesting part of the presentation was when John showed the gauges and heat maps. John highlighted the ability to view data and highlight by color which is good for performance analysis and hotspot detection (slide 35) something that will help IT better communicate with business.

His gauge display (slide 33) showed how well your IT assets are being used. John also suggested that gauges can be used for max, mean and min measurements.

Find more information on the latest TeamQuest software release.

Day one at CMG and I visited the TeamQuest User Group to hear several presentations. The first one was titled “A Pragmatic Look at Cloud Computing, Capacity Management, and TeamQuest Solutions” by the TeamQuest Director of Product Management Scott Adams.

After going through a brief description of cloud computing and its benefits, Adams spent time discussing TeamQuest’s Capacity Management Information System (CMIS) and the company’s data analysis and automation plans.

TeamQuest provides a CMIS which provides the historical data needed to make informed decisions on new services and major service enhancements. In addition, high level modeling of different scenarios helps leaders understand the potential impacts of new and changed services on the IT infrastructure. For more information, read “Release 10 and ITIL Version 3” on the TeamQuest website.

Adams’ presentation focused more on the relevancy of capacity management and the fact that the cloud is more about delivering services than it is a technology.

As product manager, Adams explained that TeamQuest will focus on:

• Adapting to new technology
• Scaling to the large enterprise
• Automation, real-time analysis

Questions dealt with the ability to service cloud service providers and/or cloud users. How does TeamQuest software interface with the CMDB? Here’s an article on the CMDB.

I’m headed to an event later tonight, but plan to make two more posts before tomorrow morning.

BTW, TeamQuest announced a software release in October 2009. Adams covered many of its benefits and future enhancements in today’s discussion. What do you need in capacity planning software for your IT and business needs?

We’ve identified 5 reasons why you should attend this year’s TeamQuest Technology Summit in Savannah, Georgia, April 28 – 29.

Your Data Center is Sprawling with Virtual Machines

Managing virtual machines can be a mess. The virtual machines need to meet service levels. You need to be able to handle upgrades and maintenance and you also need to accurately predict application performance running on virtual servers.Attend one of the sessions below for more on managing virtual machines.

• Planning and Monitoring of Desktop Virtualization on VMware ESX
• Modeling VMware Systems
• Enhanced VMware Data Collection

You’re concerned about the health of IT Operations

Even though Wall Street, the economy and business operations are sick, it doesn’t mean the sickness has to spread to IT operations. Processes such as IT Service Optimization (ITSO), initiatives to align IT with business goals, and service level management can help IT operations run efficiently in today’s economic environment. Find out how you can keep IT fit.Plan to attend one of these sessions:

• TeamQuest Model: Your Systems Health Practitioner
• Diagnostic Calisthenics
• Stay Out of the IT ER Using Automated Alarming adn Preventative Processes

Cost of attending an event is a deal breaker

This year, more than ever, companies are tightening their belts. This action is similar to over-provisioning hardware. You still need to learn, network and bring back new ideas to help the company move forward. You still need to do your due diligence to discover if new hardware is needed. TTS sessions are free. The only costs to you are air and hotel. After TTS, we offer training courses are offered at $300 per day!

Valuable training offered after TTS

Got a systems management headache? Take two days of training classes for quick relief. Following TTS, April 30 and May 1, you can train with TeamQuest Performance Software – hands on. The offered classes include:

• Administrator Training
• Introduction to TeamQuest Model
• Analyst Training
• TeamQuest Model Training

Registration for classes is part of the TTS registration process. Get training information here.Training courses are a low $300 investment in the health and management of your IT infrastructure.

Need to increase productivity and cut costs

TTS sessions can show you how to boost response time and reduce down time by keeping your systems tuned and ready. Learn how to increase efficiency while at the same time dodging costly outages and slowdowns. Know which users or business entities are responsible for using IT resources, by accurately allocating IT resource consumption to the right people or organizations.

Register for TTS today before it’s too late!I hope to see you in Savannah, Georgia.

Craig

We apologize for this change, but please update your bookmarks to show this blog’s new URL - www.teamquest.com/blog.

The change will occur over the weekend.

Thanks for reading.

Craig

In his CMG 2008 Sunday workshop, “How High Will It Fly“, Dr Neil Gunther showed how relatively simple mathematical models fed with appropriate measurement data can be used to predict the scalability of a computing system. Unlike physical systems such as airplanes and bridges, computing systems don’t lose their wings or break apart when the load on the system exceeds the material strength.

Instead, a computing system’s performance starts to degrade; workload throughput levels off (less work is completed) and workload response times increase to infinity (work takes longer to complete, or may never complete!).

One of the important and basic tasks for a performance analyst and capacity planner is to determine these critical limits - to understand the capability of the system so that it can be fully exploited without adverse effects. This is not a trivial task. And to make matters worse, today’s popular computing systems such as UNIX and Windows servers are multiprocessing systems.

In a single processing system the capability of that single processing unit directly affects the throughput and response time of the workload running on the system. A faster or more capable processing unit will yield improved results.

In contrast, in a multiprocessing system, to utilize the full capability of the system, the workload must be divided and coordinated between the multiple processing units.

For instance, several users may be updating the same table in a database. Although to the user, the update occurs immediately, the system coordinates the work so that only one user at a time is allowed to update the data. The other users have to wait their turn. This coordination work is plain and simple overhead; it’s time spent arranging work instead of completing work. This fact is a major reason why it is difficult to determine the critical limits of multiprocessing systems. Adding additional and faster processing units may not necessarily yield better results.

Gene Amdahl, one of the pioneers in this area, actually advocated for the use of single processing unit systems even though his famous law is most often quoted in papers on multiprocessing systems, according to Dr. Gunther. Perhaps he saw how much work lay ahead!

It is interesting that IBM seems to be producing systems with faster and faster processing units, whereas Sun Microsystems is producing systems with massively multithreaded processing units. Apparently two different strategies at work out in the market.

So determining how high it will fly is not trivial.

But there is hope! Software vendors such as TeamQuest, offer products to help performance analysts and capacity planners explore the limits of their increasingly more complex and powerful computing systems. TeamQuest Model was recently updated to fully understand the behavior of multiprocessing systems (CPUs, Cores per CPU, and Threads per Core.) And where simple models only give you the boundaries of the limits of the system, TeamQuest Model also provides the components of response that contribute to the overall response time of a workload.

Pascal

The second day of the Gartner Data Center Conference has been informative. Besides the sessions, I have had some wonderful networking sessions. It appears that capacity planning/capacity management is becoming much more of a hot topic these days.

Not only is Gartner seeing more inquiries, many of the people I have spoken with in different IT operational areas are talking about the necessity of doing more formal capacity planning work. They all agree that the days of throwing hardware at capacity problems are behind us. Instead of over provisioning and continual firefighting efforts, we need to do a better job of planning for the future and spending more time tuning applications and services.

It is very satisfying to see that more and more people are beginning to see the value of the work we evangelize in TeamQuest IT Service Optimization.

Disruption in the Data Center

In the first keynote, Gartner analyst Carl Claunch discussed the “Top 10 Disruptive Technologies Affecting the Data Center.” They are in no particular order, according to Carl.

• Virtualization in storage

• Cloud computing

• Servers: Beyond the blade

• PC virtualization

• Enterprise Mash-ups

• Specialized systems

• Social Software and networking

• Unified communications

• Value of pods and zones

• Green IT

Additional Highlights from Claunch
Carl gave us a lot of information, covering all the considerations, both pluses and minuses. I’ll cover a few items just to keep things brief. Gartner sees blade servers morphing into computing fabric where memory, I/O and processor are not restricted for use by a particular motherboard and can be redeployed at will. He states that the problem with blades is that when you outgrow one, that particular piece of technology is useless to you, becoming orphaned. You paid for the capacity and processing capabilities but can no longer take advantage of them. By taking technology to the next step by building computing fabrics, you have the ability to redeploy the component parts dynamically so that you continue to gain value from the asset.

Carl discussed enterprise mash-ups, pointing out how valuable they can be to organizations. A common deployment that we see frequently is linking an internet application to one of the mapping services to help your customers find their way to your place of business. Carl points out that this technology can be important in quickly building robust applications for use internally or externally. It can also help you attract and retain the new generation of digital workers. The challenge will be in managing the technology. Pieces of the application come from a variety or web sites which are outside your control so monitoring and measuring service performance becomes much more critical…and complex.

Sidenote
My last comment for this entry is about Don McMillan, an ex IEEE engineer and now a renown comedian. He gave the second keynote of the day. If you get the chance to see him, I highly recommend it. He had most of the crowd in tears. I can’t remember the last time I laughed so much. 

More to come.

Ron

TeamQuest is building a community on LinkedIn. If you’re not familiar with LinkedIn, it’s a business-oriented social networking site used for professionals. If you are a present, past, or possible future TeamQuest software user, we welcome you to participate in our TeamQuest Group on LinkedIn.

 To join or for more information, visit us on LinkedIn.

Most software companies admit that they listen to their customers and value input. One way they do that is via a customer survey. Customer surveys are a great way to acquire information about expectations and experiences. The results can help companies build strategies for improvements.

During the past several months, TeamQuest has been refining our annual customer survey as well taking some time to look at last year’s results and ask ourselves “how are we doing?”

The TeamQuest Customer Survey is focused on three areas:

1. Identifying perceptions of software and support
2. Measuring expectations and satisfaction
3. Examining feedback to generate improvement

As you might imagine, we take the findings very seriously. In last year’s survey more than 90% of respondents had a high satisfaction experience with the company. Almost 90% had a high satisfaction rating for the software product they purchased. The high marks are extremely positive, and while near the top, we continue to refine aspects of the product and customer experience to not only keep them where they are, but beat last year’s percentages.   Since our survey has remained constant over time, we are able to provide in depth gap analysis.  This helps us better target specific areas for refinement.    Our survey also allows for respondents to submit anonymous comments.  We are lucky to have such an active customer base that provides insight that we might not normally receive.   

Chances are if you’re reading this, you’ve received some kind of an email survey from a vendor.  I know you probably wonder if it’s worth your time to fill it out.  In our case, I would say the answer is definitely yes, as TeamQuest receives valuable feedback that we actually utilize.  Our survey also provides an opportunity for written comments.  We have always been pleasantly surprised at our customer’s responses, naming people at the company who have helped provide support or answers to questions.  It has not been unusual to be asked for an introduction to our support or documentation staff members at our TeamQuest Technology Summit.  Our customers want to put faces to the voices or to the email help they have received.   

Whether comments are in regard to our products, customer support, or the corporation in general, we’re listening.  If you are a TeamQuest customer, you can expect to receive our survey this fall.  However, we’re working on it now, and take it very seriously, as past comments and results have helped us refine our products, services, and support.

Craig

Hello, my name is Jerred Ruble and I am one of the founders of TeamQuest Corporation and serve as the President and CEO of the Corporation. I thought it would be a good time to start a blog.

First things first. You will not read postings that discuss the greatness of TeamQuest software. We can do that in a news release and on our website. I’ll leave the glitz, glam and promotions to the marketing department.

The purpose of the TeamQuest blog is to share with you what is going on within TeamQuest, the issues IT operations professionals experience, and our thoughts where the industry is headed. We may even challenge the thoughts of an industry analyst or two.

All of our employees will be encouraged to post to the blog, making it a company-wide tool for keeping in touch with you. Every employee who posts to this blog is here to listen. This is a conversation among peers.

Last month we met with several customers at our technology summit in Tucson, Arizona, and I expect to share some of the takeaways from that event.

Here’s a link to the event - http://www.teamquest.com/news-events/events/technology-summit/index.htm. Some of the topics you should read from TTS include:

• Performance management and capacity planning for virtualized environments
• The challenges of aligning IT with business
• How virtual environments are represented with IT resources
• Understanding CPU measurements for multi-threaded processors
• Analyzing business data with the user agent

Be sure to check back often.