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

by Neil J. Gunther (Author)

Under today's shortened fiscal horizons and contracted time-to-market schedules, traditional approaches to capacity planning are seen by management as tending to inflate production schedules. In the face of relentless pressure to get things done faster, Guerrilla Capacity Planning facilitates rapid forecasting of capacity requirements, based on the opportunistic use of available performance data and tools so that management insight is expanded but production schedules are not. A key Guerrilla concept is the introduction of short-range capacity planning questions in team meetings, which compels management to buy into capacity planning. 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.

Author Biography

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.