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Two Words for the Holiday Rush: Adequate Capacity

Scott Hollis

Depending upon your specific industry, the holiday rush can account for 75% – 85% of your total revenue. You cannot be caught unprepared and your systems have to be able to handle the surge in traffic. So how do you make sure your systems are not going to let you down?

Two words, adequate capacity. Capacity is the #1 reason for service degradation or failure.

Start with historical data. What was the load on your systems last year? This will probably give you the best baseline and starting point.

Now estimate how and why that will change this year. Do you have a blockbuster toy? Or are you offering the iPhone 6 at significant discount? Have you launched a massive marketing campaign or is the marketing group planning something new? Whatever it is, understand how that will impact your demand and how long the additional demand can be expected to last. Make sure you provision for it.

Harness the clouds. You certainly do not want to carry excess capacity all year round, just for this one day or a relatively short time period. Reach out for on-demand capacity from a public or private cloud provider. Run synthetic transactions using your APM tools to ensure your infrastructure will not fold under pressure. Use cloud bursting for as long as needed and dial down as you notice decline in demand. As you move your services to and from the cloud, remember, the location of your services should be transparent to the customers.

Unified monitoring tools can manage your services whether they are running on your local infrastructure, on your private cloud or even a third party public cloud. When issues happen (yes – "when" not "if") you can quickly identify the root cause and get a rapid resolution, hopefully well before the customer is impacted.

You want your customers to be able to access your site and more importantly, you want them to be able transact business while they are there. Make it easy for them and less of a headache for you and your organization.

Scott Hollis is Director of Product Marketing for Zenoss.

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Two Words for the Holiday Rush: Adequate Capacity

Scott Hollis

Depending upon your specific industry, the holiday rush can account for 75% – 85% of your total revenue. You cannot be caught unprepared and your systems have to be able to handle the surge in traffic. So how do you make sure your systems are not going to let you down?

Two words, adequate capacity. Capacity is the #1 reason for service degradation or failure.

Start with historical data. What was the load on your systems last year? This will probably give you the best baseline and starting point.

Now estimate how and why that will change this year. Do you have a blockbuster toy? Or are you offering the iPhone 6 at significant discount? Have you launched a massive marketing campaign or is the marketing group planning something new? Whatever it is, understand how that will impact your demand and how long the additional demand can be expected to last. Make sure you provision for it.

Harness the clouds. You certainly do not want to carry excess capacity all year round, just for this one day or a relatively short time period. Reach out for on-demand capacity from a public or private cloud provider. Run synthetic transactions using your APM tools to ensure your infrastructure will not fold under pressure. Use cloud bursting for as long as needed and dial down as you notice decline in demand. As you move your services to and from the cloud, remember, the location of your services should be transparent to the customers.

Unified monitoring tools can manage your services whether they are running on your local infrastructure, on your private cloud or even a third party public cloud. When issues happen (yes – "when" not "if") you can quickly identify the root cause and get a rapid resolution, hopefully well before the customer is impacted.

You want your customers to be able to access your site and more importantly, you want them to be able transact business while they are there. Make it easy for them and less of a headache for you and your organization.

Scott Hollis is Director of Product Marketing for Zenoss.

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As businesses increasingly rely on high-performance applications to deliver seamless user experiences, the demand for fast, reliable, and scalable data storage systems has never been greater. Redis — an open-source, in-memory data structure store — has emerged as a popular choice for use cases ranging from caching to real-time analytics. But with great performance comes the need for vigilant monitoring ...

Kubernetes was not initially designed with AI's vast resource variability in mind, and the rapid rise of AI has exposed Kubernetes limitations, particularly when it comes to cost and resource efficiency. Indeed, AI workloads differ from traditional applications in that they require a staggering amount and variety of compute resources, and their consumption is far less consistent than traditional workloads ... Considering the speed of AI innovation, teams cannot afford to be bogged down by these constant infrastructure concerns. A solution is needed ...

AI is the catalyst for significant investment in data teams as enterprises require higher-quality data to power their AI applications, according to the State of Analytics Engineering Report from dbt Labs ...

Misaligned architecture can lead to business consequences, with 93% of respondents reporting negative outcomes such as service disruptions, high operational costs and security challenges ...

A Gartner analyst recently suggested that GenAI tools could create 25% time savings for network operational teams. Where might these time savings come from? How are GenAI tools helping NetOps teams today, and what other tasks might they take on in the future as models continue improving? In general, these savings come from automating or streamlining manual NetOps tasks ...

IT and line-of-business teams are increasingly aligned in their efforts to close the data gap and drive greater collaboration to alleviate IT bottlenecks and offload growing demands on IT teams, according to The 2025 Automation Benchmark Report: Insights from IT Leaders on Enterprise Automation & the Future of AI-Driven Businesses from Jitterbit ...

A large majority (86%) of data management and AI decision makers cite protecting data privacy as a top concern, with 76% of respondents citing ROI on data privacy and AI initiatives across their organization, according to a new Harris Poll from Collibra ...

According to Gartner, Inc. the following six trends will shape the future of cloud over the next four years, ultimately resulting in new ways of working that are digital in nature and transformative in impact ...

2020 was the equivalent of a wedding with a top-shelf open bar. As businesses scrambled to adjust to remote work, digital transformation accelerated at breakneck speed. New software categories emerged overnight. Tech stacks ballooned with all sorts of SaaS apps solving ALL the problems — often with little oversight or long-term integration planning, and yes frequently a lot of duplicated functionality ... But now the music's faded. The lights are on. Everyone from the CIO to the CFO is checking the bill. Welcome to the Great SaaS Hangover ...

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