TeamQuest’s Dave Wagner and our storage partner Intellimagic’s Brett Allison gave attendees an in depth look at automated, exception-based capacity planning solution that spans servers, storage, and a plethora of business data sources.

Using TeamQuest Surveyor’s automated reporting capabilities in conjunction with the detailed performance and capacity data from Intellimagic as well as the rich server and network performance and capacity data of the TeamQuest CMIS, we are able to provide comprehensive, federated analytics extended across server/storage. Extending Surveyor’s capabilities to encompass the storage domain while still fully integrated with any/all other data sources/use-cases is a powerful application of TeamQuest technology. The sky is the limit – financial, power consumption, application response, resource utilization, service catalog, trouble tickets…the list is endless. All of these data sources, in one place, correlated and automated in an exception-based format.

The TeamQuest storage solution uses an SMI-S compliant storage data collection and storage. We currently support EMC and IBM in VMware environments. Expansions are planned throughout 2013 to include other storage brands and platforms. We can integrate with other storage tools and data sources as well. Click here for more information.

Everyone is talking about creating, using, or exploiting the numerous advantages of cloud computing. There are so many vendors out there saying so many things about why cloud is the perfect fit for you.

Forrester Analyst James Staten delivered a thought provoking presentation on how to turn cloud economics to your advantage without the vendor hype.

IT is being left out of many business discussions because of the requirement of speed to market and the perception that IT is the “Department of No.”

There are three sets of forces that are reshaping business technology: business ready, self-service technology; empowered, tech-savvy employees; radically more complex business environment.

Business ready, self-service technology includes SaaS, mobile, tablets, and cloud platforms. The market in this area has exploded and grown much more rapidly that anyone anticipated. Cloud is no longer for test and development – you cannot ignore this trend.

Self-sufficient, tech-savvy workforce is rising as well. It isn’t the “young whipper-snapper” that brought a Mac into the workplace. These changes are now being driven by people with a “V” in their title.

Your business environment will be radically more complex. By the year 2020, the US will be overtaken by China in terms of GDP. North American businesses will have to adapt and realize the size and importance of this market. New competitors, new products, new markets require the business to think and act drastically different.

The initial reaction of IT is, “NO! What about security? You can’t back that up! You can’t…” IT needs to embrace the cloud via 5 Habits of Cloud-enabled IT Leadership.

1. Embrace it where it fits. Understand what services are out there and what their economic models are.

2. Get your hands dirty. If you know your business is using a cloud service and no one in IT has an account or access, you can’t understand it. You need to know what your business is using.

3. Acknowledge and leverage hybrid. Realize you are already hybrid if you have a SaaS application in use within your organization. You have to have performance management and capacity planning work all the time so you can see what is coming down the pipe.

4.Plan for failure, plan for success. You have to understand that things fail in the cloud a lot. Traditional enterprise applications assumptions (stable, reliable hardware, static relationships, uninterrupted network, etc.) highlight why traditional applications struggle to run on true clouds.

5. Run the numbers. Cloud is not always cheaper. Be informed of the cost and how the economics of cloud differ.

The basics of cloud economics:
1. Elastic scale delivers just-in-time capacity.
2. Pay-per-use keeps costs low.
3. Self-service fuels productivity.

Stages of cloud economics:
1. Scale-up: elastic and transient applications.
2. Scale-down: application optimization and performance monitoring.
3. Profit Center: new revenue streams and hybrid architecture.

Improving Cloud Efficiency Using Model-based, Transaction-aware Management – Leonid Grinshpan, Oracle.

Mr. Grinshpan showed attendees how to use TeamQuest to accurately capacity plan for a cloud implementation. He showed the flexibility of using TeamQuest Predictor to model various scenarios to ensure SLA’s are met. Grinshpan walked through a real life case study that proves how TeamQuest can help in your cloud implementation.

Keep All of Your Services, Apps, & Servers Running at Optimum Levels Using TeamQuest Predictor’s New Automated Analysis Capabilities – Scott Johnson, TeamQuest.

TeamQuest’s Predictor and capacity planning guru, Scott Johnson, detailed the latest automated analysis features that help remove the complexity of capacity planning. By systematically automating prediction scenarios in a routine manner, TeamQuest is able to take the guesswork out knowing the health of your services. Here’s more information on TeamQuest’s AutoPredict feature.

Optimizing IT Services in a VMware Environment – Evan Anderson, TeamQuest.

VMware is the leader in virtualization technology and Evan showed TTS attendees how to make the most out of their VMware environment. TeamQuest’s VMware solution offers unprecedented storage, system, and network capacity planning all in one view. TeamQuest’s agentless VMware data collection provides you the capability to analyze, report, and capacity plan your VMware environment.

Surveyor Out of the Box Reporting with EyeR – Walter Verhoeven, CREATIVE Associates

CREATIVE Associates is a valuable TeamQuest partner and their latest solution extends the capabilities of TeamQuest Surveyor. These out of the box reports help you save time and money by eliminating the need to develop your own views for Surveyor and providing intelligence for virtualized environments instantly after installation. Contact us for more information.

TeamQuest’s Director of Product Management, Scott Adams, ended the morning session of TTS 2013 by keeping us up to speed with the latest developments of TeamQuest Performance Software in the past several months.  Here’s a rundown:

1. TeamQuest Performance Indicator (TPI) – a unique measurement of system and workload health. From 0 to 100, TPI simplifies and automates predictive analysis of performance. Our website has a collection of information on TPI including a video, release data sheet, and additional web pages explaining TPI.
2. TeamQuest CMIS for Storage – Powered by our partnership with Intellimagic, the TeamQuest CMIS for storage automatically maps how virtual machines are connected to storage devices, identifies performance bottlenecks regardless of where they may be – storage, server, virtualization layer, and provides capacity planning for your storage environment. Taneja Group wrote a white paper on the storage capabilities combined with systems to create a very powerful solution that is only offered at TeamQuest. We are not aware of any other company doing this in the market.
3. AWS EC2 Support – thinking about moving a workload or application to the cloud and worried about how much it might cost or how it will behave? TeamQuest can now predict exactly how a migration to the Amazon cloud will go. Here’s an earlier blog post on these capabilities.
4. PostreSQL Database Option is Available – to help increase scalability as well as decrease costs of another popular relational database that we support.
5. Additional Virtualization Support – added support for KVM, extended HyperV as well as VMware capabilities and measurements.
6. A host of performance, administrative, and product usability improvements

Scott did go through future plans and activities, but those are reserved for TTS attendees’ eyes only.

Director of Global Services, Per Bauer, took the stage this morning to talk through the TeamQuest Capacity Management Maturity Model.

Attendees of TTS understand the value of capacity management. It helps you avoid service interruptions, avoid unneeded purchases, avoid over-provisioning, and increase IT efficiency by mitigating risk.

To understand capacity, you need to understand what exactly you are managing. Over the past several years, we have seen the transformation from 1 server, 1 application to dynamic resource scheduling to the many flavors of cloud computing available today. You need to be able to cope with these changes in people, process, and tools.

Measure–>Analyze–>Plan. You have many options of how you collect data, how you can analyze the data, and what methods to use to plan for capacity.  Understanding the differences and implications of the choices is key to developing the correct strategy for your organization.

There are different levels of capacity management – component, service, and business. Each level builds the foundation for the next helping to provide a comprehensive, business oriented capacity management discipline.

Capacity management also involves an accuracy tradeoff. Some portions of your business may not require a high level of certainty in capacity planning while other critical aspects demand thorough testing and planning to ensure maximum availability.

So, where should you start? ITIL provides a framework for continual service improvement. For some, an ITIL implementation just isn’t a good fit – it’s intimidating and might be too high level.

The TeamQuest Maturity Model is another option to entertain. Each level of maturity is identified by a distinct set of characteristics covering people, process, and tools; and culminating with suggestions for next steps that can be taken to increase your maturity.

If you would like to find out where you are on the journey to capacity management maturity, take this short 15 question survey. Here is the link to the white paper Per wrote on maturity. You can also contact Per directly at per.bauer@teamquest.com.

TTS is quickly approaching and I wanted to share with everyone how you can stay in touch with what’s going on and be interactive before, during, and after the event. We know everyone can’t make the trip to the heart of Texas hill country, so we’ll be live tweeting and live blogging the event and posting to a variety of other social sites. Make sure to follow us for updates and join the conversation!

A few highlights of who will be speaking:

1. Cameron Haight – Gartner Analyst. Cameron will be discussing how to deal with complexity via design-centered IT.
2. James Staten – Forrester Analyst. James will examine how to take advantage of cloud economics.
3. Per Bauer – TeamQuest Director of Global Services. Per pioneered our Capacity Management Maturity Model and is going to show how to elevate your maturity to the next level.
4. Scott Adams – TeamQuest Director of Product Management. Scott will review the latest features and highlighting what is coming in the very near future.

Full agenda can be found here.

Here’s how you can stay connected to what’s happening this year:

1. TeamQuest IT Service Optimization Blog – You’ve already made it here if you are reading this, but we will have recaps of all of the general and breakout sessions.
2. TeamQuest on Twitter – Live commentary on the event.
3. #TTS2013 Hashtag – A collection of all tweets related to the event.
4. TeamQuest on Google+ – If you prefer Google, we do Google.
5. TeamQuest on LinkedIn – Our LinkedIn company will be sharing updates, too.
6. TeamQuest on Facebook – Don’t forget to like us on Facebook, you’ll see a lighter side of the event here.

Put it on your calendars, set a reminder, or write yourself a sticky note to check out TTS this coming Sunday through Tuesday, April 21-23. If you like what you see, you can always attend in person next year!

The EMEA edition of the TeamQuest Technology Summit began today in London with a challenge made by TeamQuest’s Managing Director of EMEA Operations, Jason King. Jason advised attendees to take a moment and make note of the most crucial problems they face while working to optimize IT services and manage capacity for their organizations; TTS offers a unique venue for learning the solutions for those problems.

At TTS attendees have easy access to TeamQuest expertise as well as the expertise of other attendees. That expertise can be tapped via personal networking during meals and breaks, by taking in demonstrations in the demo room, or from listening and watching presentations. Jason suggested that attendees make it a goal to learn the solutions to their biggest challenges within the 36-hour time window of TTS. I’ll call it a kind of race to get the best possible ROA (Return on Attendance).

TeamQuest’s CEO and President, Jerred Ruble, followed Jason with a presentation titled, “2012: A Year of Transformation.” TeamQuest is always transforming, but with 2012 the pace is quickening. As one analyst noted, TeamQuest is now the last un-biased independent capacity management vendor standing. But Jerred is not satisfied with that accomplishment. He described the company’s plans for maintaining an aggressive pace for rolling out new products and services in a stepped-up effort to meet the changing capacity management needs of enterprise IT.

Vice President and Principal Analyst J.P. Garbani of Forrester Research delivered an excellent presentation on the changes that traditional capacity management and planning processes need to implement in order to stay current with virtualization, private, and public could deployment platforms. Taking full advantage of these computing models requires decision support: performance and costs are two elements of the decision. With the emergence of these new platforms, some thought capacity management would become obsolete, but the reality is that these platforms make it even more relevant than before.

More than ever, we need to know where things are. Applications must be easily moveable, application architecture must change, and financial information must be available to drive technology choices. Capacity planning becomes a necessity. Performance and capacity management must be redefined.

Most of the existing capacity planning and management processes are component-oriented (network, storage, compute) and run in isolation. Virtual and cloud technologies require a holistic approach that is business-service-oriented, not component limited. The process is aimed at:

1. Placement of virtual and physical resources
2. The resolution of conflicts between virtualized applications running on the same host
3. The consideration and integration of power, cooling, and floor plans
4. The creation of service-oriented capacity plans, which will let the organization determine the best potential platform for the deployment of new and existing services

Garbani’s recommendations include:

1. Reinforce and capitalize on I&O’s capacity planning skills at the technology level.
   1. Tool expertise needed to provide the objective data used in capacity planning
2. Capitalize on service management solutions.
   1. Service catalogs, dependency discovery tools, and configuration management systems are critical elements.
3. Place more focus on financial management.
   1. The cost-value ratio is what counts. Without the ability to evaluate and simulate financial scenarios, capacity planning is a mere exercise in technology forecasting, not a decision support process.
4. Take advantage of roles outside of IT and their unique skill sets.
   1. There are roles outside IT that are used in cost-value analysis and global production requirements analysis.

For more information, check out the Forrester Research article, I&O’S New Capacity Planning Organization.

At TeamQuest Technology Summit, we have presentations geared toward the business as well as geared toward the technical usage of TeamQuest Performance Software. Below is a recap of the first two technical breakout sessions that proved to be quite informative for the audience.

How Derived Tables Can Help with Analysis and Reporting – Jim Smith

The first question you might have is, “What are Derived Tables and why would I need them?” Well, TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer/Reporter presents performance data collected by the TeamQuest agents in the form of tables. You can pull together data from multiple tables into a single table. Then you can add fields to those tables whose values are calculated from other fields in the same table. This capability is referred to as Derived Tables.

TeamQuest Global Services pro Jim Smith ran through a few real life examples of how to put Derived Tables into action. The first example was using Derived Tables to see data from a User Agent with TeamQuest Service Analyzer. The second was performing mathematical functions on an existing table and creating new fields. And the last example was combining tables together to report on business metrics with system level metrics.

Smith walked through the details of exactly how to create Derived Tables to drive business value in your organization. A very useful tool!

Modeling Database Consolidation – Nell Owens, Midwest Independent System Operator (MISO)

Many business create large and complex databases due to the nature of their business and consolidating databases may be one of the more tricky tasks to take on. But Nell Owens provided a real life case study of how MISO handles consolidation of their databases.

Owens began by giving an overview of their current database infrastructure supporting 17 databases on 4 servers. By analyzing the CPU utilization of the infrastructure they uncovered a bottleneck that needed to be addressed in order to prevent potential down time and service delivery impacts.

By using TeamQuest Model to analyze a variety of “what if” scenarios, Owens was able to identify the appropriate configuration that would allow for smooth sailing with MISO’s database consolidation project. A great real life example of the power of TeamQuest Performance Software!

Director of Product Management Scott Adams led off with a recap of Release 11 that just came out a few weeks ago. His excitement for this release shows, and it’s contagious! Given the hallway talk, attendees are ready to get their hands on it.

Product Manager Perry Stupp described the philosophy of the TeamQuest Surveyor product. He said they’ve spent the last 6 years developing this product based on user input. “Customer understand their problems better than anybody – it’s been our job to listen so we can build a product that meets their needs.” He likens the flexibility of TeamQuest Surveyor to legos…you can snap together the same legos in different ways to create a Star Wars Death Star or a bionicle or anything else. In much the same way, TeamQuest Surveyor provides flexible building blocks so customers can adapt it easily to fit their needs.

Future releases of TeamQuest Surveyor will include enhanced end-to-end analysis, giving users the ability to look at the performance and capacity of infrastructure devices both in isolation and holistically. More out-of-the-box integration with additional data sources is a top priority, as well as building a community of users that can share the cool views and reports they use.

We’ll be seeing some auto predict features soon, too! Sophisticated algorithms will run in the background and predictions will be saved for analysis. That’s some leading-edge stuff! Adams also talked about some automation features coming in TeamQuest CMIS. All of this feeds into the underlying theme of scalability, convenience, usability, and automation.

With TeamQuest and our customers working together as partners as freely and openly as is occurring at this event, the journey ahead should be exciting!