Good White Paper on Capacity Management by Microsoft

Capacity Management Overview
The Capacity Management SMF helps organizations achieve and sustain the IT service capacity requirements they need to support their business at a justifiable cost. For the purposes of this document, the term “capacity” is one of convenience, which, depending on the context, may imply resource capacity, such as storage, processor speed, network, or human resources, or an end-to-end IT service capacity, such as messaging, customer relationship management (CRM), or order processing. Many of the principles and suggestions for best practices still apply regardless of the type of capacity being optimized.
Capacity management is made up of three subprocesses:
• Business capacity management (BCM)
• Service capacity management (SCM)
• Resource capacity management (RCM)
These subprocesses all share a common set of activities that are applied from different perspectives. They include the following:
• Modeling
• Service monitoring
• Performance management
• Demand management
• Workload management
• Analysis
• Change initiation
• Optimization
• Trend analysis
Each of these subprocesses works toward the production and maintenance of a capacity plan and triggers requests for change through the appropriate channel. These activities all support the proper management of resources and service performance levels in order to conform to current and anticipated business requirements.

to read the full white paper please click on the link below -
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/solutionaccelerators/cits/mo/smf/smfcapmg.mspx#ESF

OPNET’s Application Performance Management (APM) solutions

OPNET’s Application Performance Management (APM) solutions ensure that applications will perform effectively in production, that systems have adequate capacity to support them, and that networks that deliver application functionality can meet service level objectives.

for more information click on the link below -
www.opnet.com

Capacity Planning and Design solutions by OPNET

OPNET’s Capacity Planning and Design solutions leverage OPNET’s unique virtual network environment, which provides an ideal venue for infrastructure planning. The virtual OPNET model accurately captures the behavior of networks, applications, and servers, allowing organizations to pro-actively provision the infrastructure to meet performance and availability requirements of new and existing applications and services.

for more information click on the link below -

www.opnet.com

BMC TM Application Response by BMC MANAGED SERVICES

The BMC TM Application Response Time Monitoring Service uses real application transactions
to quantify the end user experience — can even report differences due to geography, network
and user type. The BMC TM Application Response Time Monitoring service can monitor a wide array of applications and protocols — over 60 in all. We can also consolidate all application availability and performance data collected into a single centralized database and Web portal, so you can report on your complete enterprise. Gain a complete and holistic view of your performance, rather than one application/customer/data center at a time.

for more information click on the link below –
http://documents.bmc.com/products/documents/87/90/58790/58790.pdf

Break from BLOG

Will be back on Oct 8

Business Dashboard by Nimsoft

The NimBUS Dashboard Gallery demonstrates the creative use, and flexibility of the NimBUS Dashboard Design Toolkit.

For more information click on the link below -
http://www.nimsoft.com/solutions/dashboards/gallery.php

The gallery shows examples of NimBUS Executive and Business Dashboards that have been created by Nimsoft customers, Nimsoft Partners, and or Nimsoft in-house staff.

Monitoring Microsoft Exchange Server

Before deploying Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 in a production environment, you should establish routine, automated monitoring and error detection strategies for your operating system and applications. Immediately detecting application and system errors increases your chances of resolving errors before the system shuts down. Monitoring can also help alert you of scalability needs. For example, if one or more servers are operating at capacity some or all of the time, you can decide if you need to add more servers or upgrade the hardware of existing servers.
For more information about monitoring, see “Monitoring and status tools” in Windows Server 2003 Help.
You can use the following tools and programs to monitor your Exchange Server 2003 organization:
* Exchange 2003 monitoring tools
* Windows Server 2003 monitoring tools
* Additional monitoring tools
* Monitoring with MOM
* Third-party tools

For more information click on the link below –
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa997513.aspx

Storage Monitoring – ManageEngine OpStor

OpStor is a multi-vendor storage infrastructure monitoring tool offering unified Inventory, Fault and Peformance management for Storage Arrays, Fabric Switches, Tape Libraries, HBAs and Host servers through a webbrowser.Major devices supported are: EMC CLARiion/NetApp/HP-EVA/Hitachi HDS/StorageTek/IBM FastT/InforTrend/Areca ARC storage arrays,Brocade/EMC/McData/Cisco switches,Dell PV/ADIC/STK/Qualstar/IBM SLX Tape Libraries,QLogic/Emulex HBAs.

for more information click on the following link -http://manageengine.adventnet.com/products/opstor/index.html

25 Interesting Things That You Learn About Computers only in The Movies

1. Word processors never display a cursor.
2. You never have to use the spacebar when typing long sentences.
3. All monitors display 2 inch high letters.
4. High-tech computers, such as those used by NASA, the CIA, or some such governmental institution, have easy-to-understand graphical interfaces.
5. Those that don’t will have incredibly powerful text-based command shells that can correctly understand and execute commands typed in plain English.
6. Corollary: You can gain access to any information you want by simply typing “ACCESS ALL OF THE SECRET FILES” on any keyboard.
7. Likewise, you can infect a computer with a destructive virus by simply typing “UPLOAD VIRUS.” Viruses cause temperatures in computers, just like they do in humans. After a while, smoke billows out of disk drives and monitors.
8. All computers are connected. You can access the information on the villain’s desktop computer, even if it’s turned off.
9. Powerful computers beep whenever you press a key or whenever the screen changes. Some computers also slow down the output on the screen so that it doesn’t go faster than you can read. The *really* advanced ones also emulate the sound of a dot-matrix printer as the characters come across the screen.
10. All computer panels have thousands of volts and flash pots just underneath the surface. Malfunctions are indicated by a bright flash, a puff of smoke, a shower of sparks, and an explosion that forces you backward. See #7, above)
11. People typing away on a computer will turn it off without saving the data.
12. A hacker can get into the most sensitive computer in the world before intermission and guess the secret password in two tries.
13. Any PERMISSION DENIED has an OVERRIDE function.
14. Complex calculations and loading of huge amounts of data will be accomplished in under three seconds. In the movies, modems transmit data at two gigabytes per second.
15. When the power plant/missile site/whatever overheats, all the control panels will explode, as will the entire building.
16. If you display a file on the screen and someone deletes the file, it also disappears from the screen. There are no ways to copy a backup file — and there are no undelete utilities.
17. If a disk has got encrypted files, you are automatically asked for a password when you try to access it.
18. No matter what kind of computer disk it is, it’ll be readable by any system you put it into. All application software is usable by all computer platforms.
19. The more high-tech the equipment, the more buttons it has. However, everyone must have been highly trained, because the buttons aren’t labelled.
20. Most computers, no matter how small, have reality-defying three-dimensional, real-time, photo-realistic animated graphics capability.
21. Laptops, for some strange reason, always seem to have amazing real-time video phone capabilities and the performance of a CRAY-MP.
22. Whenever a character looks at a VDU, the image is so bright that it projects itself onto his/her face.
23. Computers never crash during key, high-intensity activities. Humans operating computers never make mistakes under stress.
24. Programs are fiendishly perfect and never have bugs that slow down users.
25. Any photograph can have minute details pulled out of it. You can zoom into any picture as far as you want to. Example: “What’s that fuzzy thing in the corner? I don’t know, let’s check. It’s the murder weapon! Let’s look under the bed for the killers shoes. no, just some comics books (Marvel 1954, very rare). Let’s check the closet shelves…!”

article – http://www.naachgaana.com/2007/09/10/25-interesting-things-that-you-learn-about-computers-only-in-the-movies/#more-8284

Web-based Business Service Dashboards

The assystBSM Web Client delivers an integrated view, or “Dashboard” representing real-time and historical end-to-end Business Service availability, performance, security, and end-user experience. Regardless of the underlying technologies and management platforms deployed throughout your organization, assystBSM provides vital service health information direct to your Web browser, providing support staff with the ability to rapidly identify service impacting technology failures, understand their business impact, and zoom in to the failing object level. Immediate access to tools, online help, procedures, and automation scripts is provided via context sensitive launching to restore service fast.

for more information click on the link below –

http://www.axiossystems.com