Capacity Planning: A Non-technical View

1. Capacity Planning:A Non-technical View St. Louis CMG Tuesday, August 24, 2010 Jim Glauert

2. Typical Capacity Planning Presentations Trending Regression Queuing Theory Application/Network Topology Benchmarking Other technical stuff St. Louis CMG August 24, 2010

3. This Presentation This presentation has nothing to do with any of those things St. Louis CMG August 24, 2010

4. Why Capacity Plan? • Nobody likes surprises • Most organizations work within a budget • You want to insure your part of the organization gets its “fair share” of the budget • Running out of capacity can impact the organization’s bottom line • It gives you a job St. Louis CMG August 24, 2010

5. What Is Your Role as Capacity Planner? Source of unbiased information Presenter of options Provide guidance for future direction Someone to blame when there’s not enough capacity St. Louis CMG August 24, 2010

6. What Is The Scope Of Your Plan? CPU Disk Tape Network Floor space Power consumption Single platform Multiple platforms St. Louis CMG August 24, 2010

7. Who Is The Immediate Audience? CEO CIO CTO VP Department Head Facility Manager My Boss St. Louis CMG August 24, 2010

8. Who Is The Ultimate Audience? CEO CIO CTO VP Department Head Facility Manger My Boss St. Louis CMG August 24, 2010

9. What Is The Impact Of Trickle-up? • Challenger Example • State explicitly what is • Fact • Probable Expectation • Unexpected • State the impact of these scenarios St. Louis CMG August 24, 2010

10. Where Do I Get Information? Technical data sources are a good place but this is a non-technical presentation Organization chart Application owners Business owners Help desk Project review boards Budgets and business forecasts St. Louis CMG August 24, 2010

11. What Do I Ask? How’s it going? What’s new? What works? What doesn’t work? Changes in user base Artificial constraints ($) St. Louis CMG August 24, 2010

12. What Language? MIPS CPU seconds Cores Tapes Disk KB/GB/PB $ Relative % St. Louis CMG August 24, 2010

13. What Do I Do With This Information? • Apply it to the “techie stuff” • Adjust growth percentages • Add stepwise changes • Turn the crank and see the new projections • Double check with areas that are changing a great deal. Validate you heard what they said and they understand how it impacts the plan. • Feed it up the food chain St. Louis CMG August 24, 2010

14. Eliminate Future Surprises • Provide regular feedback to those you survey • Chargeback • $ impact • Percentage of the IT budget St. Louis CMG August 24, 2010

15. Use The 80/20 Rule Survey the biggest users the most often Be aware of changes they are making (new releases of software) St. Louis CMG August 24, 2010

16. Play Johnny Appleseed Dedicate some time in your user surveys to advertise the latest technology Make sure they understand the direction your organization is going and what they can do to follow Try to make connections between the business and the applications Sharing your knowledge is the best way to get them to share their knowledge St. Louis CMG August 24, 2010

17. Measure Results • Accuracy over time • Off 5% per month compounds to 80% off for the year • Budget impact • Number of phone calls St. Louis CMG August 24, 2010

18. Advertise Success Point out the timeliness of changes driven by your forecast Measure savings of deferred upgrades St. Louis CMG August 24, 2010

19. Know Who To Blame http://despair.com/blame.html Explain unexpected capacity changes Measure the impact of hardware changes on your workload (are MIPS on the old box equal to MIPS on the new box?) Provide feedback often enough to shrink the window for unexpected capacity changes St. Louis CMG August 24, 2010

20. Live To Forecast Another Day Compare your forecast to a straight-line growth forecast. Did you do better? Checkout “Forecasting 101” by Michael Gilliland of SAS: http://www.sas.com/reg/web/corp/907017 or http://www.sas.com/resources/asset/slides.pdf St. Louis CMG August 24, 2010