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"Great capacity planning is always built on collecting and using the data that lets you depict resource consumption... subdivided into business functions that are meaningful to your business," says Ron Kaminski.

Is your IT organization using your hardware capacity to its full potential? Do you know whether you're buying new equipment because you really need new capacity, or are you simply covering for a malfunctioning process? Are you reporting capacity data in terms that people can understand? Join us was we talk with Ron Kaminski, ITS Senior Consultant at Kimberly-Clark Corporation to find out answers to these questions and more.

Bio

Ron Kaminski is ITS Senior Consultant at Kimberly-Clark Corporation. Ron has lectured on capacity and performance management conferences around the world.

Questions

1. You've lectured at capacity and performance management conferences around the world on the practical value of capacity management in enterprise data centers.  How long have you been in the capacity planning field?
2. In addition to using capacity planning to effectively consolidate or virtualize servers and applications you promote capacity planning as an ongoing activity - Talk about some of the best practices that you follow around ongoing operational capacity planning.
3. What are the some of the key-benefits of doing ongoing capacity planning?
4. What are your keys to success?
5. Where should people start?  What are some of the pitfalls that people new to capacity planning fall into?
6. What should companies look for when selecting a capacity planning tool?
7. What metrics should they track?  How do you measure success?
8. Can you share some of the success/metrics you’ve achieved at Kimberly-Clark?

A thorough understanding of ITIL (now considered the worldwide, de facto standard for IT service management) equips you with the knowledge to deliver high-quality, customer-centric IT services to the business. ITIL Foundation Certification is the first step towards more advanced knowledge of Service Management, including ITIL Manager Certification and ITIL Practitioner Certification. This podcast series focuses on the five modules that comprise the Service Delivery ITIL core volume, which concentrates on what services IT must supply to the business to deliver agreed-upon support.

ITIL Certification Series, Part 2 of 2 - Service Delivery: Podcast interviews with Atwell Williams, director of IT Service Management at BMC Software, Inc.

Service Level Management (Part 7 of 11)

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Achieving improvements in service quality and reducing service disruption through effective Service Level Management can ultimately lead to significant savings in time and money. This process is used by organizations to determine the level of IT service needed to support the business. It also enables monitoring to identify whether the required service levels, and predetermined Service Level Agreements (SLAs), are being achieved.

Capacity Management (Part 8 of 11)

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This ITIL process ensures that the IT infrastructure's capacity matches the fluctuating and evolving demands of the business -- in the most cost-effective and timely manner. Achieving this requires that you understand how current IT resources are being used, then develop a Capacity Plan. Once you understand the current use and future requirements, effective Capacity Management can help you match resources with business needs in the most efficient way possible.

Availability Management (Part 9 of 11)

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Availability of IT services has never been more important to the success of the business. In most companies today, if IT stops, so does the business. These days,advancements in technology have netted significant improvements in the IT infrastructure's availability and reliability . Fault-tolerant, and error-correction, design features in hardware and software now reduce the risk of IT component failures, providing improved levels of availability for the business.

Service Continuity Management (Part 10 of 11)

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In today's highly competetive and service-oriented business environment, organizations are judged on their ability to continuously operate and provide service at all times. This ITIL process is concerned with managing your ability to continue to provide pre-determined and agreed-upon levels of IT services that support the minimum business requirements following a business interruption. Interruptions may result from an application or system failure, or a complete loss of the business premises. Business processes and technology are so interdependent today that an effective Service Continuity Management process is critical to your overal business and IT service continuity planning.

Financial Management (Part 11 of 11)

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IT Financial Management is the discipline of ensuring that IT infrastructure is obtained at the most effective price. This involves accurately calculating what it costs to provide IT services so that an organization can clearly understand IT charges. These costs may then be recovered (or charged back) from the customer of the service.For accurate budgeting, it is also essential to forecast future IT infrastructure costs; this is also an important component of the Financial Management ITIL process.

Resources

BMC Education

Atwell Williams - ITIL Certification Series, Part 1 of 2 - Service Support

Bio

Atwell Williams is presently a director of IT Service Management within BMC Software's Business School. In this role, Mr. Williams is responsible for educating customers as well as BMC staff in the areas of IT Service Management (ITSM) and the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). Mr. Williams is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and BMC Customer Forums. He has also published several white papers on the subject of ITSM and Continuous IT Service Improvement.

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Now is one of those rare points in time in our industry when a revolutionary change is taking place in new technology. Virtualization is what is driving that change today, says Dave Wagner, solutions management director for Capacity Management and Provisioning at BMC Software. You see, "a perfect storm" is brewing: business units have to do more with less, CFOs question why their IT departments are spending money on hardware they aren't using to capacity, and IT is pushing to buy even more hardware to support business growth.  Operating more efficiently is the only way to prevent a disaster from happening ... and virtualization is the critical component you need to do this.

BMC takes a lifecycle management approach, Dave says. First, you have to understand where you are now; know where you'd like to be, and what steps you need to take to get there; and then optimize the steps to get you there successfully. Apply the discipline of capacity management to virtualization, he warns, because the business risk of not doing capacity planning for an enterprise is failure. No matter what the technology change, you've got to plan and you've got to be efficient. And if you don't execute these two actions, you're sure to pay for it later. The benefits? Simple: accelerate business agility, assure your ability to deliver against your service level agreements (SLAs), and mitigate risk. It's a no-brainer.

Resources

BMC® Performance Assurance® Suite for Virtual Servers

Marimba® Configuration Discovery from BMC Software

BMC® Performance Manager for Virtual Servers

Virtual Strategy Magazine: Part 2 - BMC's Virtualization Solutions with Dave Wagner

Bio

Dave Wagner is a solutions management director for Capacity Management and Provisioning at BMC Software. He is responsible for driving overall solution strategy, pricing, requirements, and positioning for BMC's families of proactive performance analysis, modeling and dynamic provisioning and orchestration solutions across leading enterprise platforms and their associated application environments. He has spoken at numerous conferences including the Computer Measurement Group, the premier conference for resource management and performance evaluation professionals.

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In a business environment that's highly competitive, demands speed and agility, and is unforgiving of "stumbles" like an hour of downtime, it's too easy to get caught up in buying lots and lots of the latest technologies, like virtualization, then expecting instant returns on that investment.

But that can be an expensive trap; one that BMC Software's Dave Wagner has seen plenty of businesses fall into.

It's certainly not a bad thing to invest in new technologies ... what CIO wouldn't want to optimize their IT systems' performance and drive down costs: these add value to the entire company. But be sure to plan for the new additions first, cautions Wagner. To realize real solutions to business problems, companies must build on a foundation of good planning before any new software or hardware purchase. Otherwise, those investments may just end up costing your business more money than they will save, in the long term.

So, here's some advice on maximizing your IT performance from a guy who actually plots what is the most optimal driving route to his job on any given morning.

You should determine where your business is in the continuum of IT maturity. This continuum might range from having the ability to monitor and manage your system's performance, to proactively concentrating IT resources to remedy real problems, to actually modeling what will be the impact of any given change made to your IT infrastructure -- whether it is adding hardware or changing a business process -- then determining the impact of that change, and deciding whether or not to make the change, and if so, how best to make implement it. Going through this process upfront may take some time and some investment, but that investment could make big differences in your company's bottom line.

Bio

Dave Wagner is a solutions management director for Capacity Management and Provisioning at BMC Software.  He is responsible for driving overall solution strategy, pricing, requirements and positioning of BMC's families of proactive performance analysis, modeling and dynamic provisioning and orchestration solutions across leading enterprise platforms and their associated application environments. He has spoken at numerous conferences including the Computer Measurement Group, the premier conference for resource management and performance evaluation professionals.