Preface
The Sun BluePrints Series provides best practices information in book form for the users of Sun products. The series looks at the combination of techniques and methodologies of assembling Sun and third-party products that are needed to solve real-world problems and business needs.
Capacity Planning for Internet Services provides detailed yet concise recipes for performing capacity planning tasks for high-growth-rate Internet services. It assumes that there is very little time or expertise available to perform these tasks.
Who Should Use This Book
This Sun BluePrints book is primarily intended for Capacity Planners, Operations Managers, Systems and Database Administrators, Systems Integrators, and Systems Engineers. It can be used as a first introduction to the subject of capacity planning and performance management in an Internet-oriented environment. The techniques described are quite generic, and the only areas of this book that are Sun specific relate to understanding some of the measurements available on the Sun platform. It does not assume any background in capacity planning and avoids the detailed mathematics of queueing theory as much as possible. However, many references are provided for advanced reading.
How This Book Is Organized
The two authors of this book bring together a wide variety of experiences to provide a practical but innovative guide to the problems of capacity planning in high-growth-rate Internet environments. Adrian Cockcroft is a Distinguished Systems Engineer at Sun and is well-known for his expertise and many presentations on performance tuning and tools. Adrian initiated this writing project, structured and scoped the book, and is primarily responsible for the Scenario Planning and Observability chapters. Bill Walker is one of the most senior members of the Sun Professional Services (SunPS) organization. He has worked on many large Internet sites, currently designs processes and methodologies for the SunPS team to implement, and regularly presents training classes on performance tuning. Bill is primarily responsible
for the Capacity Estimation, Suggested Processes, and Tools Overviews and Evaluations chapters.
Chapter 1, "Introduction," is an overview of the reasons why this Sun BluePrints series was written and a description of the problems it tries to address.
Chapter 2, "Theoretical Principles," explains some of the underlying principles involved in managing high growth rates and in making trade-offs between conflicting requirements.
Chapter 3, "Suggested Processes," describes how to implement processes and procedures for establishing service level agreements and performing capacity planning.
Chapter 4, "Scenario Planning," introduces a simple way to identify your primary bottleneck, perform capacity estimation, define future scenarios, and perform spreadsheet-based capacity planning.
Chapter 5, "Capacity Estimation," describes how to examine CPU, memory, disks, and networks to determine the capacity available and the utilization of that capacity. A closer examination of the problems in obtaining capacity and utilization for bottleneck estimation is also presented.
Chapter 6, "Observability," looks at the reporting requirements for a site in terms of the needs of operations, engineering, and senior management.
Chapter 7, "Tools Overview and Evaluations," looks at the many tools available for capacity planning, and contains a detailed look at the TeamQuest tools that the SunPS team uses to perform capacity planning studies.
Appendix A, "Sun Constant Performance Metrics," provides Sun Constant Performance Metrics (SCPM) estimation tables for Sun servers.
Appendix B, "References," provides a list of publications and web sites for finding out about more advanced techniques, and contacting tool vendors.
Related Books
These books provide relevant background material; for full details and more suggestions, see the references in Appendix B.
- The Sun BluePrints
OnLine Web site
- The Practical Performance Analyst by Dr. Neil Gunther
- Configuration and Capacity Planning for Sun Servers by Brian Wong
- Sun Performance and Tuning--Java and the Internet by Adrian Cockcroft and Richard Pettit
- Resource Management, a Sun BluePrints book by Richard McDougall, Adrian Cockcroft, Evert Hoogendoorn, Tom Bialaski, and Enrique Vargas
- Solaris PC Netlink Performance, Sizing, and Deployment, a Sun BluePrints book by Don DeVitt
- Backup and Restore Practices for Sun Enterprise Servers, a Sun BluePrints book by Stan Stringfellow and Miroslav Klivansky, with Michael Barto
For a list of Sun documents and how to order them, see the catalog section of the SunExpress[tm] Internet site
How to Access Sun Documentation Online
The docs.sun.com web site enables you to access Sun technical documentation online. You can browse the docs.sun.com archive or search for a specific book title or subject.
