The Perception of Infinite Capacity
How many of you have infinite computing capacity in your data center? From a consumer perspective, we certainly want infinite capacity. Consumer in this sense could be a business unit in an enterprise. IT organizations certainly want to be seen as a valuable and key part of the business, but in order to keep the the customer happy, system performance and the perception of capacity when demand dictates it is important.
Many businesses have business cycles that drive a spike in computing power needs. Classic examples include the Christmas buying season, the close of a fiscal year, or the launch of a new product and it’s availability for purchase. Other examples might include a new download of a software product or operating system. All of these spikes can tax the computing systems we use in the public or private cloud.
Infinite Capacity doesn’t mean free. A cloud service should provide capacity on demand but a typical limit will the amount you are willing or able to pay for that capacity. Historically we’ve built data centers to handle some of these peaks. Failure at the peak purchasing time of year simply isn’t an option for many firms. The problem is what to do with that available and under utilized hardware the rest of the year. This is why we have seen the growth of virtualization and consolidation of systems over the past few years.
Consolidation isn’t enough. You really need to have a more encompassing strategy and part of that strategy needs to include capacity management. There are a number of techniques and tools on the market to help you validate your strategy and its execution. Please see the references below for more information in the TechNet Private Cloud content center, as well as some links to our just released products from the System Center product group.
Discussion with Bill Loeffler, Tom Shinder and Keith Combs
I had the opportunity to get on the phone with Tom Shinder and Bill Loeffler the other day and talk about Infinite Capacity. The following podcast is right at thirteen minutes and I hope you enjoy the discussion. We’re just starting this series of podcasts so we’ll be covering some interesting topics each week. Let us know if you have some questions. Enjoy!
Links to media files
If you want to download either of the following two audio files, feel free to do so. But please right mouse click the link and SAVE AS the file to your local disk.
WMA - https://msinetpub.vo.llnwd.net/d1/keithcombs/podcasts/cloudtalk/CloudTalk_Infinite_Capacity.wma
MP3 - https://msinetpub.vo.llnwd.net/d1/keithcombs/podcasts/cloudtalk/CloudTalk_Infinite_Capacity.mp3
References
Private Cloud Principles, Patterns and Concepts - Perception of Infinite Capacity