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Capacity Planning

North American Systems offers capacity planning services to help you anticipate future resource requirements. This service will ensure that you will be meeting availability and performance goals now and in the future.

Schedule an appointment with an IBM specialist to talk about capacity planning.

Capacity Planning will provide your business with:

1. The power to address availability and performance issues that impact revenue and productivity, as well as image and reputation
2. The ability to plan upgrades and optimize your capital expenditures

To handle the growing complexity of your IT infrastructure, we can help analyze and develop models to assist in predicting and planning how to meet future requirements. Our methodology of capacity planning includes four key steps:

1. Identify your workload pattern
2. Measure performance of current infrastructure
3. Analyze trends and set performance objectives
4. Model your infrastructure alternatives

North American Systems Intl. has extensive experience with multivendor hardware and software environments, specialize in the modeling tools and techniques necessary to analyze your network, applications, and systems. Capacity planning will:

• optimize existing resources and reduce support costs
• evaluate your system architecture's performance and capacity for cost savings and improved efficiencies
• improve operation of your IT systems and e-Business applications
• enhance equipment investment decision making
• addresses IT performance and capacity requirement for e-Business growth and change
• improve user satisfaction and productivity
  

North American Systems International has a history of extensive experience with IBM hardware, and has a number of qualified consultants willing to discuss the ins and outs of IBM capacity planning.

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1. Identify your workload pattern

Your workload pattern must take into consideration the transaction complexity, data volatility, and security of your infrastructure. Your systems usually fit under one of these five classifications:

1. Publish/subscribe - many media sites and search engines fall under this category, with frequently changing site content, little or no transactions performed, and usually no connection to legacy systems
2. Online shopping - security is a main issue where customers can come into a website and purchase items, while data volatility is low, and traffic is high
3. Customer self-service - some examples of sites are those that let you do banking from home, tracking packages, and making travel arrangements, data comes from legacy applications and from multiple sources, there are significant security concerns, but traffic is relatively low and growing
4. Trading sites - enabling customers to trade with each other results in very high and complex transaction volumes, volatile and time sensitive content, and security risks
5. Business-to-Business - these sites usually get data from legacy applications and multiple sources. resulting in data consistency issues, with security concerns much like online shopping sites, and moderate but complex transaction volume

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2. Measure performance of current infrastructure

You must understand the present before you can plan for the future. Measuring by volume, arrival rate, response times by class, user session time, number of concurrent users, as well as processor and disk utilization should give you a clear picture of the resource demands the workload has on your infrastructure.

Correctly identifying your workload pattern prepares you for measuring and understanding the complexities of your site and infrastructure. One of the uncertainties of including web traffic to add to your IT infrastructure load, is the random arrival of requests to your server widely varying the impact web traffic has on your workload. Holidays, stock market swings, seasonal changes, and other trends affect the traffic to your site, and is something to keep in mind when performing capacity planning.

By analyzing current typical user visits, it is possible to create probabilities about future user visit and traffic. By developing various different scripts to describe typical user visits and requests, we can get an even clearer picture of future workload requirements.

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3. Analyze trends and set performance objectives

The ability to accurately forecast request patterns is a very important component of capacity planning. Using data from step two, we can use a forecasting methodology based on constructing a set of mathematical methods and models that can isolate and characterize future trends.

Future performance objectives are usually driven by business objectives, such as improve response time to preferred customers, and other benchmarks of performance.

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4. Model your infrastructure alternatives

Now you are ready to determine the components that are needed in your infrastructure, to meet future demand on your systems and performance objectives set by management.

North American Systems Intl. is qualified to help you match components to the particular requirements and objectives of your workload pattern.

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North American Systems International has a history of extensive experience with IBM hardware, and has a number of qualified consultants willing to discuss the in and outs of IBM capacity planning.

To get contact with one of our certified IBM consultants, simply click the green button and we will follow up with you shortly. You may also contact us toll-free at 800-927-7474, or you can email us at sales@nasi.com.