Guerrilla Capacity Planning: A Tactical Approach to Planning for Highly Scalable Applications and Services

Neil J. Gunther

tammi 2007 · Springer Science & Business Media

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In these days of shortened fiscal horizons and contracted time-to-market schedules, traditional approaches to capacity planning are often seen by management as tending to inflate their production schedules. Rather than giving up in the face of this kind of relentless pressure to get things done faster, Guerrilla Capacity Planning facilitates rapid forecasting of capacity requirements based on the opportunistic use of whatever performance data and tools are available in such a way that management insight is expanded but their schedules are not.

A key Guerrilla concept is tactical planning whereby short-range planning questions and projects are brought up in team meetings such that management is compelled to know the answer, and therefore buys into capacity planning without recognizing it as such. Once you have your "foot in the door", capacity planning methods can be refined in an iterative cycle of improvement called "The Wheel of Capacity Planning". Another unique Guerrilla tool is Virtual Load Testing, based on Dr. Gunther's "Universal Law of Computational Scaling", which provides a highly cost-effective method for assessing application scalability.

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Neil J. Gunther, M.Sc., Ph.D., SMIEEE, is an internationally recognized IT researcher and computer performance analyst who founded Performance Dynamics Company (www.perfdynamics.com) in 1994. Originally from Melbourne, Australia, he has resided near Silicon Valley in California since 1980. In that time Dr. Gunther has held teaching positions at California State University-Hayward and San Jose University, as well as research and management positions at Xerox PARC, Pyramid/Siemens Technology, and JPL/NASA where he worked on the Voyager and Galileo missions. His "Guerrilla Capacity Planning" classes have been presented at such organizations as America Online (AOL), Boeing, FedEx, Motorola, Nokia, Stanford University, Sun Microsystems and UCLA. In 1996, Dr.

Gunther was awarded Best Technical Paper at the Computer Measurement Group international conference (CMG'96) and at CMG'08 he received the prestigious A.A. Michelson Award---the industry's highest honor for computer performance analysis and capacity planning. Dr. Gunther is also a member of AMS, APS, ACM and SPIE. More details can be found on his Wiki page.