Providing Affordable IT Management to SME's A simple set of questions.
In the first part of this topic I explained the four basic concepts of capacity management, these being:
1) Capacity Management
2) Capacity Planning
3) Application Sizing
4) Capacity Modelling
So how does this fit into an SME?
Well it is probably best to take the four processes and pair them as 1 & 2 (essential) and then 3 & 4 (desirable).
Capacity Management and Planning should really be considered essential for any business, as they really are part of the foundation of providing a stable and reliable set of IT services. The two key elements that drive most PC’s are processor utilisation and memory (whether that is RAM or Hard Drive). The purpose of this blog has never aimed to be technical so please forgive me for not delving down into the whys and wherefores of this area. In essence, I would ask you to consider the following questions:
a) Do you know how much hard drive you have, how much space is taken up by your data and how much this changes on a weekly basis
b) Do certain applications take a long time to load or perform poorly when you carryout certain steps
c) What do you do with data that is old and does not need to be used any more
d) What do you do with applications that you no longer need
e) How do you back your data up
f) Is your business likely to change in the foreseeable future
I hope that by asking these questions, you should have a picture of the way your IT is behaving. Now you really need to carryout a few basic tasks
a) When looking at your amount of disk space vs. usage, I have always worked to a threshold of 20% no fly zone. This gives the system enough space to move files around and you as a user enough space if some unplanned data comes along. If you are in the no fly zone, you may need to housekeep or invest in some extra disk.
b) Map your disk usage over several weeks (ideally weekly on the same day for 8 weeks). Plot this as a trend and extend the trend line. Mark on the axis representing size of data, the size of your drive and then draw a line at 80%. See where your trend line crosses these two points and be aware that you will need to take action before these points are met
c) If you are having performance issues, you may have capacity issues with memory usage. Whilst this is less common (certainly with the size of memory issues with PC’s) it may be worthwhile have a system health check carried out by a local IT company. If you are technically savvy you may be able to use some of the basic monitoring tools (such as the task manager in windows to show CPU and memory usage) alternatively you may wish to research monitoring tools (a Google search on “PC Memory Monitoring Software returned several positive leads). The whole purpose of this activity is to know if your system is being over stretched, Good capacity planning would review this not just as a snapshot, but also in set time windows to see how resource demands change during the day and throughout the week.
d) Look at ways of freeing up space. As well as archiving data, you may have old programs that can be un-installed
I hope that the pointers above (which only scrape the surface of capacity management & planning) give you a flavour of this topic and how it affects an SME.
To summarise: Capacity Management is all about managing the today. For each of the key system resources you should know what you have, what is being used and what threshold you want to work to. If you every breach the threshold you should be considering taking remedial action
Capacity Planning is all about projecting your trend. By taking capacity usage information on a regular basis and projecting a trend line, you should be able to predict when you are going to run out (or breach your thresholds). The purpose of good capacity planning to stop a capacity related outage occurring by knowing when the problem is likely to occur. We have used the example of disk space and memory utilisation as two examples, but in a similar way, this could relate to network bandwidth or power/ports. Any resourced used by an IT system can come under the scope of capacity management. In the next part of this topic, we will start to look at Application Sizing and Modelling.
15th Aug 2009