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Setting the Stage
Dealing with thousands of daily transactions can be unnerving. To cope with a fantastic volume, companies depend upon a reliable IT infrastructure that could encompass tens of thousands of servers.

These servers must maintain high performance levels at all times, as even a slight problem could send customers to a competitor. With the potential for billions of dollars at stake - depending upon a company's availability - capacity management must be directly tied into the business plan.

Dealing with Complexity
Enterprise environments can be complex. To get to the root of the matter can be tricky. Involving management and staff could result in several different answers. Although in the case of one TeamQuest client, speed was the resounding answer.

Speaking to 100 or 1,000 won't necessarily provide the right answer. IT must get a collective view from above to arrive at the underlying causes of slowdowns and inefficiencies.

To achieve an understanding of the complexity, the first thing that must be considered is to look into existing dependencies. Some workflows, for example, will be composed of a mixture of independent and shared applications. One system may be shared by four of five workflows, whereas their other systems are independent. Then on the back end, there are an entirely different set of servers and systems with their own dependencies.

It may appear clear cut to make adjustments or add further functionality after viewing a workflow chart. Yet one workflow may have some elements using databases and middleware running on a SAN environment in London, while other elements operate on a Singapore-based platform.

The right tools show the high-level workflow view, as well as allowing the capacity planner to drill down to the lower levels to quickly see the underlying complexity. With the middleware for one part of a workflow process running on one Solaris box and the routing system on another, it is no wonder that it is hard for most people to know where delays are really coming from.

Finding Solutions
Individual solutions are not so difficult to find and implement as isolated cases. However, great care must be taken to ensure no other dependencies are impacted when it comes to major workflows. An "easy fix" in one environment could have catastrophic consequences elsewhere.

The overall goal is to understand the dependencies, set the right priorities and orchestrate the many individual efforts into an all-encompassing strategy. Within that framework, the company should be able to harness the capacity management tool to help decide what to work on.

The organization should have established minor and major milestones within each workflow. Each milestone is measured as to how long each step takes. Therefore, the organization can measure exactly how long every workflow will take and how fast each element of it is transacted.

Grasp the Multi-tiered Environment
In many IT organizations, there exists a tendency to view applications and servers in isolation. Multi-tiered modeling can be valuable to an organization for several reasons:

• Meet service level agreements
• Consolidate servers
• Plan and budget system upgrades
• Find underutilized resources
• Align IT with business demands

Use models to experiment with what-if questions and see the effects of changes before they are made. Understand, in advance, the impact of substantial changes to your environment for application distribution, server consolidation, business expansion or workload growth. This insight enables decision makers to purchase the right amount of hardware at the right time to meet business demands.