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For one of the UK’s top mobile phone companies,
One2One, Capacity Planning is not a task that is
regarded as something that ‘might be nice to
have one day’ nor is it a technique that is
purely used to try and identify the source of a
specific problem. As Graeme Chalklin, Project Manager
at One2One explains: “When you are spending
millions of pounds on your IT infrastructure, capacity
planning is a core function of the business. Capacity
planning and Performance Management are essentially
about prevention and detection of bottlenecks and
allied to that, the ability to make decisions on
when to invest in additional equipment. Clearly
one can’t buy too late, but on the other hand,
one doesn’t want to buy too soon as the chances
are the technology may well be cheaper in a month
or so’s time.”
One2One is using the
Athene Capacity Planning product from Taunton-based
Metron Technology to manage capacity and performance
on the company’s
UNIX computers, twenty four hours a day and seven
days a week. Plans are also in hand to extend
One2One’s use of Athene to their rapidly
expanding number of NT servers.
Athene made its debut into One2One in December
1997. The company had recently centralized its
Capacity Planning function, which prior to this
had tended to be managed on a more fragmented,
departmental basis. Graeme Chalklin: “The
Capacity Planning team now owns all issues relating
to this area of the company’s IT systems,
the key areas of activity being data collection
and the conversion of this into the information
that becomes regular and ad hoc reports.”
One2One looked at other
products on the market eighteen months ago,
and chose Athene believing not only that it
would do the required job, but that it would
be quicker and more straightforward to implement
than some of the competitive offerings. Graeme
Chalklin was also keen to work with a UK-based
company who would be able to deal with any
problems or support issues with as little ‘hassle’ as
possible
The team at One2One is
responsible for the day to day Capacity Management
of all the company’s
Unix machines, which include products from HP,
Sun, Sequent and a number of other manufacturers.
These Unix machines handle the vast majority of
all the company’s other applications, including
such critical activities as interface systems
to customer care and billing, call record collection
and accounting, management of roaming calls with
overseas providers, commission payment, maintenance
of the data warehouse, credit checking –
in fact all the systems that form the day to day
running of a major, fast growing telephony company.
Athene is tasked with data capture and collection
on all these and has proven to be “an extremely
reliable product for the amount of data and number
of platforms it looks after”.
One area that has grown
at a phenomenal rate is that of pre-payment
(whereby customers pay in advance for calls)
which avoids the need for credit checking and
billing. One2One now has more than one million
pre-payment accounts, which account for some
40% of the company’s customers.
Unlike a number of organizations who use
a product like Athene purely for identifying
and solving problems, such as slow responses,
One2One use it continuously to capture and collect
data from the UNIX platforms. The collected data
is passed automatically to a central database
for subsequent analysis and to form the basis
of the regular reports. These reports are currently
produced as Word documents but it is planned
that within the next couple of months, they will
be published using the company’s
intranet which, according to Graeme Chalklin “is
just a further extension of our commitment to
automate the process of Capacity Management as
much as possible.”
Monthly reports, currently
covering around seventy of the UNIX platforms
can be produced within five days. Consisting
of a summary report and more detailed analysis,
the reports comprise both textual and graphical
information. Graeme Chalklin: “We
simply could not produce the monthly report on
the number of machines we have without the automation
provided by Athene. It is absolutely essential
to our mode of working and is the core of the
reporting process. Imagine the time that it would
take for a person to provide a report on so many
platforms each month. To achieve this current
level of automation, we have invested a considerable
amount of time and effort over the past twelve
months, identifying repetitive tasks which can
either be eliminated or significantly reduced.
As we have learnt and improved upon these techniques,
we are now much more keen to exploit any aspect
of automation, even if the task involved appears
to be relatively trivial. An example of this is
embedding charts into the monthly report. If you
consider that there are on average five charts
for each platform, that’s a total of between
three to four hundred charts for the monthly
report. By automating the process of placing
the chart with its associated commentary, we
can reduce a half day task to just three minutes,
with the added benefit that it is error free.”
Using a tool such as Athene also frees the capacity
planning team from time-consuming routine tasks,
allowing them to spend the majority of their time
looking at the results generated and analyzing
opportunities for greater efficiency or reduced
costs.
In addition to the regular production of the
monthly reports, Athene is also used for ad hoc
reports, which may be based on requests for information
or possibly identifying the reason for a problem,
and then using the resultant information to make
an informed decision.
Quantifying, particularly
in monetary terms, the benefits which have
been achieved with the use of Athene is not
an easy matter. However, as Graeme Chalklin
points out: “Getting the
reports to the right place as quickly as we do
means that decisions are based on data that
is only two to three days old. If we carry
out an ad hoc report as well, then the information
is absolutely up to date.
“In a number of
cases, we have been able to defer purchasing
hardware by being able to identify what is
actually consuming resources and then modifying
kernel parameters to regain performance.”
The original decision nearly two years ago
to buy from a UK-based, specialist Capacity Planning
company has paid off. Graeme Chalklin has developed
a close working relationship with developers at
Metron and is able to actively suggest enhancements
to the product that will not only benefit One2One,
but will also be incorporated into Athene for the
advantage of other corporate users.
Such has been the success
of the partnership with Metron and the benefits
achieved by the use of Athene that the capacity
planning team is now considering introducing
Athene for Windows servers to manage this area
of One2One’s computing
environment. According to Graeme Chalklin extending
their use of Athene for Windows is a logical move
because it will obviate the need to learn any
new processes and “we will also be able
to employ much of the automation that we have
developed. Based on our experience in using the
UNIX version of Athene, I feel confident in using
the NT product.”
Further developments are also planned in the
Unix arena, with the roll out of Athene to a further
thirty machines bringing the total to one hundred.
One2One is continuing
to grow rapidly, with competitive tariffs encouraging
more take up of the company’s
services. “It is key for us to be able to
bring our products to market as quickly as possible.
The speed with which we can achieve this is dependent
absolutely on what our computers (and the people
who operate them) can deliver. Being confident
about our Capacity Planning and Performance Management
is fundamental to the success of this business
strategy.”
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