Just when you’re thinking about taking some well-deserved time off work
to enjoy the holidays with your family, you realize with frustration that you
won’t be able to put your Blackberry down for even a minute. Your company
had a big promotion throughout December and your Web site came crashing down
because it couldn’t handle all the business. Too bad the marketing department
didn’t let the IT department know about this Web promotion in advance.
To make matters worse, all those extra temporary employees that were brought
in to handle new business are sitting idle because they can’t access your
system to help customers make their last-minute purchases. And, as if that weren’t
enough, someone on your team decided to do an unplanned system update at the
worst possible time.

Here are some practical tips for preventing these holiday misadventures.

They shop 'til you gridlock

You’ve really got a problem when marketing announces a new promotion just
before the holidays and you don’t have the capacity to run it. In the past,
IT simply went out and bought more servers, but that option is too expensive
and impractical in today’s complex environment. It’s like installing
a second fireplace because Santa’s too big to get into your house, when
what he really needs is a wider chimney.

The best approach isn’t to buy new boxes; it’s to do a better job
of planning and capacity management. All too often, though, people don’t
know how to do effective capacity planning, and they're wary of putting virtualization
on a production machine. So, they end up with a room full of machines that gobble
up electricity. They forget to assess their baseline. They don’t do an
inventory to determine what boxes are on the floor, what applications are running
on those boxes, what capacity they are currently using, and what service level
agreements they have.

The good news is there’s software that can help you determine what's running
on each of your servers and then analyze whether you can run virtualization
or share workloads. This kind of information can help you know if it’s
possible to double the transaction load without killing the response time. A
completed “what-if analysis” could help you predict what’s needed
to keep Web site traffic running smoothly during the holidays. With all this
information in hand, you could double the workload or combine two servers and
see the impact on performance. It’s so much more effective than just crossing
your fingers and hoping everything works. And don’t discount the importance
of keeping customers happy so they’ll return to your site again and again.

The clock is ticking, but the temps