Capacity Planning and Performance Monitoring

Capacity Planning and Performance Monitoring

The need for computer capacity evaluation and continual monitoring is even more important when an enterprise is transferring its computing power to cloud-based systems. This transition from on-premise to cloud-based computing introduces exponentially greater levels of variables and performance issues that can have an immediate and significant effect on any enterprises' ability to perform even the most fundamental it tasks (Read, 2010). Computing power transitioned to the cloud must be done with a deliberate strategy of ensuring a high degree of scalability, security, and a clear strategy of single- versus multitenancy, or the allocation of specific dedicated memory and processor resources for specific tasks (Rasin, 2010). The intent of this analysis is to evaluate those areas of cloud-based systems' computing resources and define how enterprises can safeguard their enterprise applications and performance over the long-term.

Best Practices in Managing and Optimizing Computing Capacity Evaluation

The catalyst of any successful transition of computing power from on-premise enterprise systems to cloud-based solutions is the concept of virtualization. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle and VMWare are all multibillion dollar companies who are creating sophisticated technologies for creating virtualized server architectures that ensures the highest levels of computing performance possible for a given enterprise usage scenario. Virtualization is a series of technologies that enable a traditional server to be optimized for the specific needs of an enterprise-level software deployment (Luo, 2010). An example of virtualization being successfully used to scale computing power in the cloud would be the entire CRM system for Microsoft running in partitioned, multitenant partitions in their own data centers.

Virtualization is also the core technology of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud computing components, and is an area of intensive investment by Amazon with their Web Services (AWS) (Engebretson, 2011). Virtualization's role in enabling cloud computing is a core aspect of the economics of these nascent, yet rapidly growing area of computing. Implicit in the transfer of applications from on-premise to the cloud is the need to replicable server performance, in effect creating a virtual server (Luo, 2010). This is precisely what the virtualization technologies that Amazon is working on today from a Research & Development (R&D) standpoint are designed to achieve, in effect parsing the literally thousands of servers they have into virtual machines that can be leased to enterprise customers (Engebretson, 2011). Virtualization requires the differentiation of processor power and cycles, allocated in an optimized sequence to ensure the highest performance possible. This is why cloud computing is still an imprecise science at best, with significant lags in performance and inconsistent performance on large-scale performance requirements (Luo, 2010). VMWare is concentrating on these aberrations in performance to create optimized product and services mix for each of their software and hardware products, looking to ensure a high level of computer capacity utilization over time. Amazon's lessons learned in managing one of the most successful e-commerce sites were directly applicable to their launching the Amazon Web Services (AWS) services that includes a large proportion of virtualization at the foundational level (Engebretson, 2011). Scalability, for Amazon, eventually meant having support for over fifty websites and thousands of transactions a second worldwide in a multitude of currencies. These lessons learned in creating what would become the first Cloud-based distributed order management system gave Amazon insights into how virtualization could transform millions of other businesses as well (Engebretson, 2011). In the story of Amazon's move into offering Amazon Web Services as a business are insights into how virtualization can be a force multiplier in the development of entirely new business models as well. If Amazon needs to closely monitor its computing capacity evaluation when moving its millions of transactions a year to the cloud, every other business, less skilled in virtualization technologies must do the same. The rapid growth of business intelligence (BI) on cloud-computing platform is response to the needs companies have for not only monitoring their businesses, but also monitoring how their cloud computing platforms are performing (Shen, 2011).