Determining when and how to expand your system

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 Power Systems (PM for Power Systems)
• IBM Systems Workload Estimator