As your business needs change, your system must also change. To
prepare for any changes, you will want to model the current system and then
see what would happen if the system, the configuration, or the workload were
changed.
As your business needs evolve, so do your system needs. To plan for future
system needs and growth, you will need to determine what would happen if the
system, the configuration, or the workload were changed. This process is called
trend analysis and should be done monthly. As your system approaches resource
capacity guidelines, you may want to gather this data more frequently.
Trend analysis should be done separately for interactive and batch environments.
If your company uses a certain application extensively, you may want to perform
a trend analysis for the application. Another environment that may be important
to track would be the end-of-month processing. It is important that you collect
trend analysis data consistently. If your system's peak workload hours are
between 10:00 AM and 2:00 PM and you collect trend analysis data for this
time period, do not compare this data to data collected from other time periods.
To do a proper job of capacity planning and performance analysis, you must
collect, analyze, maintain, and archive performance data. IBM® offers several
tools that help you with your capacity planning, resource estimating, and
sizing:
- IBM Performance
Management for eServer™ iSeries™
- PM iSeries completely automates
collecting data, analyzing data, and archiving data and provides you with
summarized performance and capacity information that is easy to understand.
PM iSeries helps you plan for
and manage system resources through ongoing analysis of key performance indicators.
This function ships with the i5/OS™ licensed
program. There is nothing that you need to do other than activate the function
and periodically check that the data is being collected and transmitted to IBM.
All collection sites are network secure, and the PM iSeries service
transmits only nonproprietary performance data to IBM. The time of the transfer is completely
under your control.
- Workload Estimator
- The Workload Estimator is a tool that helps you size your system needs
based on estimated workloads for specific workload types. Through a web-based
application, you can size the upgrade to the required iSeries system
that accommodates your existing system's utilization, performance, and growth
as reported by PM iSeries.
As an additional option, sizings can also include capacity for adding specific
applications like Domino®, Java™, and WebSphere®, or the consolidation of
multiple workloads on one system. This capability allows you to plan for future
system requirements based on existing utilization data coming from your own
system.
- PATROL for iSeries - Predict
- This product helps manage iSeries performance
by automating many of the routine administration tasks required for high availability
and optimal performance. Additionally, it offers detailed capacity planning
information to help you plan the growth of your iSeries environment.
See Select a performance management strategy for more information about
creating and implementing a performance strategy.