Capacity Planning for Internet Services - Softcover

Adrian Cockcroft; Bill Walker

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0130894028 ISBN 13: 9780130894021

Publisher: Prentice Hall, 2001

Synopsis

Assuming there is very little time or expertise available for the task, systems engineer Cockcroft and information technology architect Walker provide detailed recipes for performing capacity planning tasks for high-growth-rate Internet services. They assume no previous background in capacity planning, and avoid the detailed mathematics of queueing theory as much as possible. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

About this title

Review:

The demands placed on a server farm by e-commerce and other Internet services differ from those imposed by longer-studied and better-understood processing tasks, largely because the potential demand for publicly accessible Internet services is practically infinite. Capacity Planning for Internet Services takes a careful look at traditional mainframe capacity planning techniques in light of the Internet's characteristics, evaluating their effectiveness in the new environment. The book offers new tools, formulas, and tables for use in estimating server requirements (they focus on the Sun Microsystems product line) for Internet work.

Ideal for system administrators, design engineers, database administrators, and anyone else involved in planning an upgrade path for an Internet-connected Sun environment, this book spends a lot of time documenting the factors that can create performance bottlenecks in Solaris servers and explaining how to measure peak loads. Hourly, monthly, seasonal, and special load increases are modeled mathematically, and the authors offer ideas for planning hardware capacity to match demand. They're explicit in their recommendations, calling for specific processor speeds, disk capacities, bandwidth provisions, and other specifications. Throughout, the emphasis is on keeping server capacity just slightly ahead of user requirements, so as to minimize expense. --David Wall

Topics covered: Models for predicting Internet users' demands upon Sun servers providing database lookups, transaction processing, and other services. Strategies for documenting user demand, tools for making observations, mathematical models for making predictions, and processes for planning capacity are all detailed.

From the Back Cover:

Capacity planning is a well known discipline, particularly for sites that have a mainframe oriented background. The explosive growth of Internet sites and E-commerce has presented new challenges in managing performance and capacity. In many cases, time constraints and business demands can prevent normal capacity planning techniques from being applied. Classic datacenter capacity planning methods can be adjusted and successfully applied to this new Internet-centric computing environment.

This BluePrint charts a course through the available techniques and tools, examines timescales and return on investment for different methodologies and provides a framework for decomposing big problems into solvable subproblems.

About this edition

• Publisher: Prentice Hall
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0130894028
• ISBN 13: 9780130894021
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 221