Joshua Hoffman, lead geek at AppAssure Software, recently highlighted a really interesting podcast. The podcast, hosted by Dana Gardner of E-Commerce Times, discusses the changing approach to capacity planning that has begun to develop as a result of cloud computing’s rising star.
Joining Dana in the conversation is Neil Ashizawa, manager of HP's Software as a Service (SaaS) Products and Cloud Solutions. Dana and Neil discuss the fact that, as a result of the ability of cloud computing environments to be elastic – that is, to expand and contract themselves based on need and demand – the way that we, as IT professionals, plan those environments needs to change.
Neil put it the following way:
Old-fashioned capacity planning focuses on the peak usage of the application, and it had to, because when you were deploying applications in-house, you had to take into consideration that peak usage case. At the end of the day, you had to be provisioned correctly with respect to compute power. Oftentimes with long procurement cycles, you'd have to plan for that.
In the cloud, because you have this idea of elasticity, where you can scale up your compute resources when you need them, and scale them back down, obviously that adds another dimension to old-school capacity planning.
This obviously has some wide-reaching implications on virtually every aspect of IT infrastructure planning (including how we plan for demand on our Exchange servers, web servers, SQL servers and so on.) And needless to say, our adoption of virtualization technology has a substantial impact as well.
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