Providing Affordable IT Management to SME's Is biggest always the best?
When it comes to planning a system, should you always go for the biggest and most powerful option?
Capacity management underpins ANY aspect of your IT systems, whether that is the ability to store information (normally controlled by disk space), the ability to process information (normally controlled by processor speed / memory allowance) or the ability to transmit information (normally controlled by your network capability). It also underpins the performance of your application under “normal” and “seasonal” situations, an area sometimes overlooked when looking at the capability of some systems. Understanding that this blog and the purpose of goitil is to help small and medium sized businesses with their management of IT services, the market these articles are pitched at are generally those which are not cash rich, and are trying to squeeze every percent of margin out of their accounts.
With this in mind, keeping capital spend as low as possible is a good way to maintain profit, but we do not want to be taking a short term approach and investing in a technology that will not grow with our business or buying a solution that is not fit for purpose. Capacity management has three real concepts, two of which I believe are relevant to my audience (the final one, really being in the realms of larger organisations or those with high IT dependencies).
1) Capacity Management
2) Capacity Planning
3) Capacity modelling
So what are these concepts, well let me explain:
Capacity Management: This tends to be a reactive process and normally provides a set of checks or alerts to warn you of impending problems. Some examples:
• Setting a hard drive threshold at 20% spare space. This could be checked once a week and if it is breached, the decision to archive some data or by more disk could be made
• Ordering a level of reporting from your dedicated network line so you are able to see the peaks in your usage (you may find your staff are heavily browsing theinternet at the same time you are trying to send important information to your supplier / customers)
Capacity Planning: Unlike capacity management, this process is about planning for the future. Normally capacity plans are developed to cover as a minimum your accounting cycle, so if you set your budget in November for commencement in April, you would probably want to do your capacity plan in Oct to cover 18 months minimum. Capacity plans normally takes historical information captured over a period of time and present it in a graphical scale with trends extended forward (in our case above for 18 months). Max’s and thresholds are then overlaid onto the graph to demonstrate where capacity breaches will occur. Normal process is to take a standpoint of “comparable growth” but if known factors (such as opening an extra 2 offices) are known, these can be added in to influence the trend line.
Capacity Modelling; As already mentions, I believe this is outside the scope of the small to medium sized business, but it is worth exploring these points. Capacity modelling as the name suggests is about predicting the outcome of a current service if known factors changed. I worked for an organisation heavily dependent on credit card transaction and the process was that all of the branches credit card files got pulled back to the centre and consolidated into a single file. That single file was then transmitted to the banks in a single burst WITH A FIXED TRANSMISSION WINDOW OF 3 HOURS. Well, with the introduction of chip and pin, the information held in the file had grown (in terms of data) but was still fitting in the transmission widow. Going into Christmas, no one had thought to factor in the increase in sales (which equalled increase in credit card transactions). During the busiest day of Christmas trade, the full payment did not make it to the bank due to the file being to big for the window and an amount of interest was lost.
So how does this fit into my opening statement? Well when buying or planning a new system (or looking to spend money to upgrade)it is always benefitial to know your true requirements. Given the option of an 80 Gb drive of a 250Gb do you really need to spend the extra £150? Next time, we will look at some simple ways to set up basic capacity management
3rd Oct 2009