I recently had the priviledge of visiting the Panama Canal, and boy does it make you appreciate the importance of capacity planning! Traffic on the canal has risen from about 1000 ships in 1914 to 14,684 in 2011 (source: Canal de Panama Maritime Services). Over 321 million tonnes of cargo passed through the canal and lock system last year alone, and this number will increase dramatically once the expansion project is completed a couple of years from now including new locks at the Pacific and Atlantic ends that will allow much larger ships to pass through. The capacity of the canal is estimated to double with completion of this project - wow! I watched a ship containing 2000 automobiles pass through the Miraflores Locks and it was a pretty awesome sight. Nothing is left to chance as the ship is carefully guided on each side through each phase of being lowered towards the ocean. Safety is the mission-critical requirement - protection of the valuable people and cargo inside as it makes the journey.
Careful capacity planning for servers is also imperative to protect the passage and availability of mission-critical data! I've heard people complain that this can be a tedious task, taking months to achieve, and sometimes involving guesswork. The good news is that there are really solid tools to help make this important task so much easier today. One of the "gems" of HP-UX is the HP Matrix Capacity Planner (part of the Matrix Operating Environment). It provides both real time and historical system and power utilization data. The data can detect systems that are over or under utilized allowing you to proactively rebalance these systems and improve server performance.
One of our experts on capacity planning, Steve Cooke, is featured in this Gems video for HP Matrix Capacity Planning. He explains how it works and discusses the smart solver recommendations and "5 star" rating system for utilization and the recommendations the tools provides to make planning easier and help you save your organization money. You no longer need to be locked in to rigid allocations of over provisioned resources. I hope you'll take a few moments to check out Steve's video as well as the other items we have for you to learn more.
Happy new year everyone - hope 2012 is a successful year for you and your organization.
