September 2008

“Capacity planning must be a proactive continuous process of Best Industry Practices performed at any change of your transaction processing system. Successful organizations are proficient in reducing costs of system resources, assessing capacity demands in their current environment, and implementing automated ways to reduce the time and complexity of the benchmarking process. Every core business objective, ranging from regulatory mandates to pre- and post-freeze periods, are candidates for benchmarking system capacity and processing integrity.

In performance benchmarking the purpose is to measure the utilization or consumption of system resources on the target system in exchange for completion of a business objective, i.e. the processing of a single transaction. Regardless of the indicator being examined, it is necessary to define benchmarks in advance - the targeted standards or levels to which measured conditions will be compared, often to finite degrees of success.

Due to the dynamic and ever-changing nature of real time transaction-processing environments, achieving benchmarks can be a difficult process with many obstacles. From the CIO to the systems analyst, it is imperative to have a defined testing methodology of benchmarking to keep the IT infrastructure aligned with change. Without consistency, repetition and insightful interpretation of results in your capacity planning and disaster recovery schemes, your organization may be missing target goals and falling behind the competition. ”

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