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.

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!

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!

The presentation started with a level set of what exactly cloud computing is. According to Bittman, cloud computing is a style of computing where scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to customers using Internet technologies. Here’s a funny cartoon that was used to highlight the varying definitions of cloud computing:

With all new technologies there are concerns. The main concerns highlighted were security/privacy, immaturity, costs, performance, and regulatory compliance. With these concerns, 78% of respondents to a Gartner poll said their organization would be pursuing a private cloud strategy by 2014.

Here are the ten steps to building private clouds:

1. Leadership
   1. Buy-in, culture, politics, new usages, vision
2. Define Services
   1. Automatable, need speed, high-volume, with business
3. Evaluate Alternatives
   1. Non-IaaS, public, non-cloud
4. Create Metrics
   1. Economics, quality, agility
5. Build a Business Case
   1. Proactively evaluate cost and benefits, with business
6. Develop a People Plan
   1. Skills, organization, buy-in
7. Develop a Business Management Plan
   1. Funding model, Hybrid IT
8. Develop a Technology Plan
   1. Fabrics, hybrid, interoperability, cloud management platform
9. Develop an Operational Process Plan
   1. Speed, fit to purpose, DevOps
10. Start Small, Think Big
    1. Build in learning, proactive expansion

We are rooted in our core competence – IT Service Optimization. We’ve been doing this since we started – more than 20 years. Easy? Piece of cake? Not hardly. Capacity Management today looks a lot different than it did back when we started and will most certainly look different a decade from now. Competitors come and go – some fold, some get acquired. But we’re still here. After all this time. Milind Govekar from Gartner called us the last unbiased capacity management vendor standing. We’re proud of that, but we’re not settling for that. We’re continuing to grow.

Over the years, we’ve built a strong reputation that has attracted some of the biggest and best companies around the world. That reputation comes from the quality and power of our solutions and the relationships we build with our customers and prospects.

But, of course, things change. Technology evolves. Which means the problems we’re solving – and the ways we solve them – are changing, too.

We’ve been growing every year since TeamQuest formed, and our goal is to accelerate that growth in 2012. How do we intend to do that?

Change. And we’ve already started. We are re-inventing ourselves, transforming our products and services…
We have integrated a whole new product, TeamQuest Surveyor, a product that is already solving new problems for our customers.
We have new talent working alongside us and have plans to add more.
We’re simplifying our product suite, making it simpler for new customers to understand our offerings.
We’re launching TeamQuest Global Services as a new business unit, bringing our expertise in IT Service Optimization directly to bear on customer Capacity Management problems.

Those are big changes that are transforming how we address the problems that you face every day. It’s exciting. We’re looking forward to sharing the details with you here at TTS.

1. CEO Jerred Ruble’s welcoming address
2. Gartner Analyst Thomas Bittman speaking about building private clouds
3. Forrester Analyst J.P. Garbani on the new challenges in capacity management and planning
4. Inspirational speaker Aron Ralston, the focus of the movie 127 Hours
5. Susan Cramm of Valuedance discussing closing the IT demand-supply gap
6. Director of Product Management Scott Adams unveiling the new suite of TeamQuest Performance Software
7. Business Development Principals Dave Wagner and Boyd Stowe detailing the newest addition, TeamQuest Surveyor

This is the 10th anniversary of the TeamQuest Technology Summit and we are sure the event will once again be greatly informative. 2012 promises to be a year of transformation and we hope you follow this blog, Twitter, and Facebook for live updates throughout the event.

• TeamQuest Analyzer — IT performance analysis
• TeamQuest Surveyor — Enterprise capacity management
• TeamQuest Predictor — Capacity planning
• TeamQuest CMIS — Distributed Capacity Management Information System

The new release brings newly acquired Performance Surveyor fully into our product suite as TeamQuest Surveyor. Other new capabilities include:

1. TeamQuest Administration Console — a new component of TeamQuest CMIS providing policy-based management of TeamQuest software in larger installations
2. Remote agentless collection of performance data from Microsoft Hyper-V
3. Support for new versions various hypervisors and operating systems
4. And much more!

Check out our press release for more details.

To achieve this, we will offer the following categories of services

• Training Services
• Implementation Services
• Analysis Services
• Managed Services
• Strategic Services

With a comprehensive suite of services like this, we believe we will be able to say “Yes” to more things you customers ask for. It will also get us more involved with you, learning about your needs and use that knowledge to influence our future product directions.

We’ve entered the nascent stages of understanding how to manage cloud computing and virtual heterogeneous environments. This means management complexity increases since there’s no longer a permanent and exclusive relationship between physical resources and the software that runs on it. IT needs the right people, processes and tools to navigate through the hype to make this work.

Capacity management isn’t the Holy Grail, but it can provide the information you need to make miraculous decisions. The process is simple. Realize where you are now, plan to move ahead, and take the first step toward greater maturity.

Take this quiz to discover where you are now. Once you get your score, review this 8-page paper. Then take the steps necessary to move to the next stage of maturity. The majority of companies are between stages 1 and 2 (i.e., reactive and proactive).

If that’s good enough, then continue on. If you’re looking to accurately weigh costs against benefits and risks, measure process efficiency and effectiveness, and link IT services to business processes, then it’s time to get to work. Get in touch with us or leave a comment.

Of course, if you’re already providing value to the business, let us know how you’re doing it. In fact, tell everyone how you’re doing it. We all want to respond to business needs in an appropriate manner.

“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