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"Sometimes you can just stack up different parts of an application, you don't have to virtualize everything," says Ron Kaminski.

With Capacity Planning enjoying a resurgence of popularity in IT, are you behind the curve or ahead of the curve? Are you aware of how you are using your hardware? Do you know where all your dormant or orphaned applications are? Do you know why you'd want to be able to swiftly move from physical to virtual servers? Join us as we talk with Ron Kaminski, ITS Senior Consultant at Kimberly-Clark Corporation as we answer these questions and more in our conversation about planning for virtualization and consolidation.

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. Capacity planning is seen as the key process that enables organizations to successfully consolidate or virtualize and maintain performance. What are you thoughts on this?
2. Can we assume that Kimberly-Clark has joined the ranks of companies with a consolidation and/or virtualization initiatives?
3. Will you describe your key challenges in your adoption of virtualization?
4. Are you using BMC Capacity Management to address your virtualization challenges?
5. There are a lot of people who are virtualizing or consolidating workloads for the first time, and are not trained or experienced as you are from a  capacity-planning perspective.  What should companies who are new to consolidation or virtualization look out for?
6. Will you discuss keys to successful virtualization?
7. Can you give listeners an idea of the benefits they’ll receive?  What benefits have you received, or expect to receive?
8. Why is Kimberley Clark using BMC for these initiatives?
   

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Data center efficiency is the ratio between how much useful work is done and the total cost of IT.  It seems like a simple equation, but it has Dave Wagner, solutions management director for Capacity Management and Provisioning at BMC Software, scratching his head.  The problem, he says, is the price of oil.  With energy costs rising as much as 30 percent per year, depending on where you live, the dollars you spend on power will soon surpass what you spend on servers.  This poses a problem for data center managers who need to accurately manage capacity.  We can measure the cost of power at the data center level and even down to the rack level, but there is no way to measure power consumed per server.  If you've ever thought about "going green" in your data center, be sure to listen in.

Dave's blog, Twenty-First Century Capacity Management, has some thought provoking posts on this subject. He writes about the impact of global warming on IT and the data center thermal runway.  And, he poses questions you might never have pondered. Here's one:  If power is a bigger part of the cost equation than servers, shouldn't you be doing capacity management on power instead of on servers?

Resources

Dave Wagner's email:  david_wagner@bmc.com

Data Center Optimization

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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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.