InformationWeek

Predicting Performance

By Caryn Gillooly

andmark Systems Corp. last we ek released PerformanceWorks Predictor, a capacity-planning tool that complements the company's performance-management product suite. The tool lets IT administrators determine trends, predict performance, and generally figure out what kind of impact new applications will have on their enterprise networks.

Predictor takes historical performance data captured by Landmark's PerformanceWorks management software, analyzes the data, and makes forecasts. Customers can input "what if" scenarios to see how new applications, changes to the application server, or even changes in systems-management strategies might affect performance.

Jim Petersen, senior systems engineer at University Health Systems, a hospital in San Antonio, Texas, now does this type of trending manually. "We take the CPU data, plot it, and try to predict things that way," he says. Automating with Predictor could save the hospital valuable time, Petersen says.

University Health Systems, however, is running IBM's MVS; Predictor is availabl e only for Unix systems. But Landmark is readying a version for Windows NT and MVS, says Mark Knecht, VP of marketing and business development at the Vienna, Va., company. Once the other versions are available, the products will tie together and provide enterprise-level capacity planning, Knecht says.

Yellow Services, the IT arm of freight-shipment firm Yellow Freight System, isn't waiting. The Overland Park, Kan., company, with almost 100 Unix servers, needs a tool like Predictor, says Ted Keller, manager of resource management at Yellow Services. "It's just too much to keep track of manually," he says.

Pricing for PerformanceWorks Predictor starts at $20,000 per license.

Back to News in Review

Send Us Your Feedback

Top of the Page