Capacity planning is a very common activity done by several IT organizations. It is done to manage the performance of the systems is by ensuring that the system offers the best services to the users. System administrators normally restore the system functionality whenever there is a problem. It is good for the system administrator to plan in advance for such issues to avoid performance bottlenecks. Capacity building tools can be used to forecast in advance to plan how severs will be organized to handle the workload. The main aim of capacity panning is to ensure that quality services are offered to the users in a manner that is cost effective. There are three main steps in capacity development. The first one is to determine services and the level of requirements. This means that you are supposed to categorize the work that is performed by the systems and quantify the users’ expectations from the work output. The second step is analyzing the current capacity (TeamQuest, 2010). This means that the system administrator should be able to establish the capability or the computing power of the current systems. Planning for the future is the third step. This means that there are tools used to predict the business activity and the future system requirements. According to me capacity planning should be done for the cloud computing environment.
Moving to cloud computing requires the organization to make sure that applications and data make safe and smooth transition. The organization should make sure that cloud based computing resources will deliver necessary application and improved performance. There is a lot that needs to be done before moving to cloud computing. It is not just an activity of migrating from one platform to another. There should be an examination of the performance issues, what will be reprogrammed and capacity planning for the new cloud with an aim of maximizing application performance. The applications that performed very well in a data center may not offer same application on a cloud platform. The organization needs to come up with plans that will be of issue once the systems have migrated to cloud (Bulumulle and Bordin, 2003).
The purpose of capacity planning ensures that there is a thorough test of applications deployed specifically for cloud computing platforms. The key test that should be done is test the scalability of the application under different network and application conditions. Planning ensures that the organization does not only meet the demand of current business needs but also seamlessly scale to handle the unplanned demands.
The IT administrator should be able to establish the problems that relate to cloud computing. They should be able to establish the need for be issues that may result into bottleneck performance and how to overcome them. Through the capacity planning tool the system administrator will be able to monitor the performance. It also ensures that cloud machines performance is optimized. The organization will be able to come up with a forecast of the growth requirements of the system. If the organization knows by how many servers it requires in a given period, it will be able to plan on how to buy the required systems. It is important to understand the cloud workload in order to the impact on performance. Cloud computing is a new field where IT services are delivering over the internet. Users access resources such as applications, data and other IT resources. There are varying numbers of highly virtualized resources in a cloud computing environment (Franklin, 2011).
Although there is a difference between capacity planning for traditional systems and the cloud systems, capacity planning is very important for cloud environment. This is because the costs are lower and there is no need of funding of high level applications. There is also no additional cost in the process of acquiring resources in a cloud environment.
Traditionally, computing resources where organized based on the departments hence funding was based on the number of the computers that are required to serve the users. In cloud computing the organization only needs to establish the IT resources required for the organization and allow users to access services that have only been paid for. The providers need to buy hardware resources for the data centres. The decision on which hardware and their computing power is made once in a year based on the demand and the long term expectations. The main hardware devices to be purchased are the compute chassis, storage arrays and bandwidth cables.
Capacity planning is essential because it enables the planers to know the number of resources required and the timeline for purchasing them. System administrator cares much about the network disk resources, application response time, the CPU and the memory. Capacity planning ensures that all this aspects have been considered (Serrazi, 2007). There is a need to understand how resources are being used now and how they will be used in future.
Another key reason why clouding planning should be carried out is because it is not expensive compared to traditional capacity planning. It does not take a long time to buy because increasing or reducing the resources based on capacity plan is within seconds. It is possible for an organization to reduce the number of resources in a cloud environment in few seconds. With cloud computing users only pay what they assess. This meant that there are no big chunks of the paid up front. Traditional capacity planning requires upfront payment before subscription to services. In cloud environment there is no extra cost. There is no minimum price and monthly billing with cloud environment.
With the traditional computing environment, once the capacity has been expanded it is not easy to reduce it. This means that the organization suffers major losses if it has reduced activities. However, cloud computing capabilities gives subscribers an opportunity to only pay what they have used. If there was an overestimation of the storage facilities for instance, it can be reduced or if the CPU acquired was very expensive. Planning errors in traditional systems can result into big problems, in cloud environment, you can size to what you want to use now and do the future planning later.
Cloud capacity planning does not require the use of detailed instrumented systems. The stateless monitoring tools can be used to do this task. The example of the tool that can be used is the Ganglia (Tittel, 2005). It is automatic configuration software that can multicast replicated monitoring state. Unlike physical computing cloud environment does not require the predefined metrics and nodes.
It is clear that capacity planning for cloud computing is complex but it can be done. It is important that it is done because it is necessary for the optimization of performance. Sluggish data access, applications and loading of web pages causes lot frustrations to the users. Performance problems and performance bottleneck can result into crashing of the applications and data losses. Competency and reliability has a direct impact on the competency of the organization.
References
Bulumulle, G. and Bordin, M. (2003) Capacity Planning as a Performance Tuning Tool—Case Study for aVery Large Database Environment. Sun BluePrints™OnLine. Retrieved March 12, 2008, from http://www.sun.com/blueprints/0703/817-3176.pdf
Franklin (2011) IOPS: Performance Capacity Planning Explained. Synology. Retrieved Nov. 8, 2010, from http://blog.synology.com/bl og/?p=146
Serrazi, G. (2007) Shared-Memory Multiprocessor Systems – Hierarchical Task Queue. University of Lugano, Advanced Learning and Research Institute. Retrieved December 4, 2011, from http://www.idsi.md/files/file/publicatii/PERFORMANCE_EVALUATION_Exercises_Zamsa.pdf
TeamQuest (2010) How to do capacity planning, Retrieved Nov. 8, 2010, fromhttp://forms.teamquest.com/forms/USCapacityPlannin g?gclid=CKiI9oiv6qwCFQNeTAodEiyInw
Tittel, E. (2005) Systems Management Tips: Modeling can be key to capacity planning, Retrieved Nov.8, 2010, from http://searchdat acenter.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid80_gci1136148,00.html
