Maintain the Health of IT Environment
with Capacity Planning

Sore throats, coughs, congestion and the flu bug can irritate employees and decrease productivity. We take great pains to either work through the sickness or get some rest. We understand that to be our most productive, we must maintain our health. IT should ensure it does the same with its infrastructure.

The health of your IT infrastructure is important to the bottom line. Maintaining the health of your IT infrastructure involves a mature environment that includes proper capacity management techniques.

Your data center is the hub for delivering services. You and your team are the healthcare staff. Let's take a closer look at some of the ways you can improve the health of your IT infrastructure.

Server Consolidation
Just like a car, servers need to be tuned so they perform optimally. Server consolidation isn't the phrase du jour anymore. However, this is still an effective way to save costs in hardware, software, staffing and facilities.

Virtualization has been used in place of server consolidation, but there are some risks to think about. It's important to understand which servers are good candidates for consolidation and how much combined applications and workloads will compete for resources, so service levels can be maintained.

A financial client of TeamQuest used IT Service Analyzer to help with its server consolidation project, reducing nearly 70 stand-alone servers to four consolidated frames.

TeamQuest IT Service Analyzer allows a capacity planner to quickly view workloads form multiple servers across the enterprise. Good candidates for consolidation are often servers with commonalities, such as servers that:

• are located in the same physical data center,
• are underutilized,
• host workloads of similar kind,
• run the same level and make of operating system,
• have appropriate service outage windows.
• share the same security policy, or
• have the same groups of users.

Virtual Environment
The virtualization craze has moved from the initial benefits of consolidation and cost savings to disaster recovery and chargeback. Many companies have gained efficiencies with their virtual environments.

Although a virtual environment can improve the health of your IT operations, you still need to manage it so you continue to maintain the health of your environment.

According to an online survey conducted by Forester Consulting on behalf of TeamQuest, the number one difficulty of managing performance in a virtual environment was that performance problems are more difficult to resolve in a virtual environment. A close second was that the server size needed to support the virtual containers is difficult to evaluate.

IT experts know that a successful virtualization effort requires capacity planning. TeamQuest Model is a software tool that uses analytic modeling to predict the performance of an IT environment. In fact, you can avoid embarrassment from overworked virtual servers, and know in advance how many virtual servers you can realistically place on a particular configuration of a physical server. No worries about virtual server sprawl.

Pre-deployment Testing
Ensuring applications will perform as needed can be a risk. Will the desired performance level be achieved? Are the servers adequately configured? Bringing applications into production - without due diligence - can damage the health of your environment.

The process for preparing critical applications for production should include steps for determining the optimal configuration for systems that will host the new applications, aligning application performance with business requirements, and taking data center architectural policies into account.

TeamQuest knows that analytical modeling provides a fast, accurate and cost-effective alternative to trending, brute-force testing, or discrete event simulation.

One client used TeamQuest Model before bringing applications into production and discovered the results from TeamQuest Model were 98 percent accurate.

To provide for successful modeling, workloads are characterized, grouping resource utilization for business services into separate workloads during baseline creation. Adequately designed workloads, separating statistics pertaining to different applications or business services, will allow later evaluation of what-if scenarios based on the business activity forecasted for each workload.