Share your experience: How do you plan capacity demand in your IT systems?
- Reference: 1636369213
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/11/08/survey_it_system_scalability_and_capacity/
- Source link:
Right-click -> Add storage. Right-click -> Add RAM .
Job done.
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Which is fine, but it leads us into temptation – we don’t do capacity planning because the need to do so feels like it has gone away.
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This is the case all through IT, of course. We get away with designing algorithms poorly because today’s ultra-fast CPUs save our bacon through sheer speed. We don’t index our databases properly because solid state storage rescues us when our queries do full table scans. The thing is, though, we get away with this approach most of the time, but definitely not all of the time.
In this survey we’re keen to find out the extent to which our readers have had to cope with changes in demand for capacity in their systems and, more importantly, how they have managed the capacity planning process. Many of us have had to scale up systems – particularly things like virtual desktop and VPN services – due to users being sent home to work during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
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But some organizations will have kept capacity at roughly the same levels, and it’s likely that some have scaled down – perhaps through exploiting opportunities to finally get around to decommissioning resource-hungry legacy systems.
Systems perform great in the test environment but then tank when put live – often because the production database was ten times the size of the test one
We’re also interested in the science of performance and capacity planning. Most of us have come across systems that performed great in the test environment but then tanked when put live (often because the production database was ten times the size of the test one), but did we do anything to predict that?
Did we ask the users whether the app felt snappy enough during testing? Did we, for that matter, run up any electronic measures of performance and resource usage, or perhaps simulate the actions of hundreds of users with automation tools?
This correspondent was a performance tester in a previous life, and I can confirm how good it feels to know that the app will scale to 250 users thanks to the stats gathered by the test harness that simulated 250 users hammering it at once. And after go-live, did we keep asking the users and/or carry on with our electronic monitoring to gauge behavior against expected performance?
And, finally, what do we do in the long term? If you’ve devised a regime of user feedback or software-based monitoring during development testing, have you continued to use these tools – or something similar – in the medium and long term? Proactive evaluation has clear benefits, particularly if the systems are at a point where further scaling up would need new hardware or a step-up in cost.
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Do please let us know your approach, warts and all, by taking part in our short survey below. There are three questions to answer. We'll run the poll for a few days and then publish a summary on The Register thereafter.
Don’t feel bad if you tick all the “we don’t do that” boxes, because there could be many reasons (not least time and cost) for not having a humongous capacity monitoring and planning regime. And if you tick all the “We do that in spades” boxes, try not to be too smug... ®
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Cannot vote, poll closed, so I'll comment
On a poll just posted the system won't let me vote, stating that the poll is closed. O.o Same day as published, can't vote (note: mobile user).
Anyway, irony, as this topic is amazingly relevant to me as I just updated the file server due to a failing HDD.
The boss, who is usually adamant about tech, actually was the one who pushed for a full upgrade of the server, rather than simply replacing the failed HDD, under the assumption that a failed HDD is a sign of the system aging and to replace the entire unit prophylactically. Image that!
Almost 2 years ago it was dangerously full, 80% + constantly, and I managed the space by manually deleting old backup data on an ongoing basis. So, almost 2 years ago, I got authorization (again, !!! he cooperated!) to switch software packages, which brought utilization down to a constant 25% with automatic file maintenance.
Even through that, on the new server I still took the opportunity to upgrade storage 50%. Why? Because I could; MB per dollar has dropped versus the original, so for the same cost it was an easy choice
However, as noted in the first commenter's post, sync is the BEAR. It took a week to move the data from the old server to the new in-house, and I've now been waiting a week for only 2 out of the 3 data containers to be synced to the cloud.
The in-house sync was from a failing RAID, so I can at least excuse the bad throughput. But the cloud throughout stinks, and there is little way to massively change that.
Luckily I'm not dependent on the cloud, it is only the secondary backup, but would hate it if I did.
Where I work, hence posting as AC ...
It looks a lot (from the user perspective) that they do calculations (probably based on what MS tells them) and then divide by 10. Either that or it's a universal rule that any site involving Sharepoint takes many, many second to load any page. Actually, I think it's the latter - want a slow site, trust the experts at MS to deliver it for you ... v e e e e e e r r r r r y y y y y y y slowly.
Capacity planning, WHAT capacity planning?
I work for a multinational engineering consultancy with thousands of employees. I'm not involved in the operation of the company's IT systems, I'm simply a user who knows just enough to be a PITA, but the most recent change made to the file storage systems I use for work was to move everything into the cloud, with local mirrors in each office. This, predictably, immediately turned into a bad joke in many, many ways.
One day I was told to stop working with files resident on the local mirror server because it was generating so much network traffic that the cloud link was swamped just synchronising files and the nightly backups couldn't keep up. A single user, doing his job, was enough to overload the system. I was told by the head of IT to instead copy the files to my issued laptop and work locally, until I pointed out that this would be a breach of his own data security policy.
A classic example of an unfit-for-purpose system being rolled out because the users were never consulted.