Capacity Planning and Performance Modeling

Cloud-based systems

What is Cloud computing? According to Bradley Mitchell, "Cloud computing consists of hardware and software resources made available on the Internet as managed third-party services. These services typically provide access to advanced software applications and high-end networks of server computers." (Mitchell) Three examples of cloud computing that Mitchell gave was, virtual IT, software and network storage. Some of the pros and cons of cloud computing include, the cloud computing service providers provide all the core technology within the cloud. This means that the company utilizing the cloud does not have to maintain all the server equipment. This could potentially save a company lots of money depending on there server needs. With using other peoples equipment comes risks, there serves may go down and now you cannot access your data until the issue is resolved. This could mean down time for your employees and lost revenues do to work not being done or services not being met. Another con to cloud computing is the security risk. If you have information that can be detrimental to the security of your business or your customers, you might want to think twice about putting your data on a cloud. If you have a mixture of both sensitive and non sensitive information, you can have a small local server to keep the sensitive data in-house and then use cloud-based servers to house the rest of your data. Next I will discuss if a company needs to evaluate there computer capacity if they use cloud-based systems.

Cloud-Based Systems

From the back ground reading from Team Quest, How to do Capacity Planning (Rich, J., Hill, J.), I believe that it is unnecessary to a point to do capacity planning. But, you still need to know how much cloud space you will need unless you go with a pay for spaced used type plan instead of a plan that is priced for a certain amount of space. If you know your company already used X amount of server space, and you need...