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Vodafone took the decision to purchase a specialist Capacity Planning tool in 1997. Later that year, in October, the company connected its three millionth customer. With the launch of the innovative 'pay as you talk' service in November, this number had risen to five million just a month later.
Alex Bale: "The rapid growth presented a real challenge; it was evident that good Capacity Planning would be vital to Vodafone, giving early warnings about the performance of systems and providing us with powerful monitoring, reporting and forecasting capabilities."
Vodafone went out to tender for a Capacity Planning tool. A key requirement was that the selected solution should be able to handle multi-platform Capacity Planning such that it could be rolled out across the entire company. Metron's Athene product was chosen because of its all round ability in providing Capacity Planning information for both Unix and NT platforms, including the capability to monitor, model and report.
Since Athene was first installed, the Capacity Planning team at Vodafone has to support the entire UK estate. A global Capacity Planning working group for Vodafone worldwide meets regularly - a measure of the importance with which the subject is regarded within the organization.
Athene is used, primarily, within Vodafone as a tool to monitor and report on the company's commercial and network management systems. Alex Bale: "Athene provides us with an instant view of how the workload is growing and the impact of this on our hardware resources. In addition to carrying out modeling of different workloads, we also use the data and related reports from Athene as an important part of our budgetary process for justifying the purchase of upgrades, replacements and additional systems. Athene is also used to help with support-related issues, where it is useful in pinpointing the source of a specific problems such as rogue processes, for instance."
As new services are conceived and introduced (such as pay as You talk, text messaging and multi-media services), Athene is used by Vodafone to model and predict the appropriate hardware requirement to support the forecast increased demand. |
Over the years, Vodafone has built up considerable expertise in the use of Athene. The company is a member of the Metron User Group and, as such, has been actively involved in influencing the ongoing development of the Athene product. Alex Bale and his colleagues were enthusiastic supporters of the need for Athene to provide web-based reporting and this was introduced in 2000. With numerous offices throughout Newbury, paper-based reporting for Vodafone is a non-starter. The web-based reports from Athene are distributed via the company's intranet, which is an essential element in internal communications.
The CustomDB module of Athene, allowing data from other systems to be incorporated into the output from Athene to provide a comprehensive 'picture' of overall systems, is also used extensively by Vodafone. Thus, data relating to customer numbers, text messaging and billing, amongst others, can be used in conjunction with server-related information. Alex Bale: "CustomDB provides us with the ability to clearly define the capability of the systems in a language our internal customers can easily relate to, ie the business drivers for their systems. Without the use of this type of product, we'd have to base decisions on much less detailed information."
He continued: "Given the clearly defined nature of Athene's functionality, it is an eminently 'learnable' product, which means that our Capacity Planning team can really get to know it, something which is a far more difficult challenge if one is faced with a generalist product. In my view, therefore, it is better to use a product which has been developed by Capacity Planning specialists for a specific purpose, rather than a more broad-ranging solution."
In addition to its normal daily usage, Athene will also be used for major projects within Vodafone over the next twelve months. An on-going server consolidation process, due for completion in Spring 2003, will continue to involve the extensive use of Athene; for ratifying supplier recommendations and initial server sizing, for monitoring and ensuring the most efficient use of resources given current workloads and for the forecasting of future requirements given changing workload demands.
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