Guerrilla Capacity Planning: A Tactical Approach to Planning for Highly Scalable Applications and Services [Hardcover]

Neil J. Gunther (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 3540261389 | ISBN-13: 978-3540261384 | Publication Date: December 19, 2006 | Edition: 1

Under today’s shortened fiscal horizons and contracted time-to-market schedules, traditional approaches to capacity planning are seen by management as inflating production schedules. In the face of relentless pressure to get things done faster, this book facilitates rapid forecasting of capacity requirements, based on opportunistic use of available performance data and tools so that management insight is expanded but production schedules are not. The book introduces such concepts as an iterative cycle of improvement called "The Wheel of Capacity Planning," and Virtual Load Testing, which provides a highly cost-effective method for assessing application scalability.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Neil J. Gunther, M.Sc., Ph.D., SMIEEE, is an internationally recognized IT researcher and computer performance analyst who founded Performance Dynamics Company (www.perfdynamics.com) in 1994. Originally from Melbourne, Australia, he has resided near Silicon Valley in California since 1980. In that time Dr. Gunther has held teaching positions at California State University-Hayward and San Jose University, as well as research and management positions at Xerox PARC, Pyramid/Siemens Technology, and JPL/NASA where he worked on the Voyager and Galileo missions. His "Guerrilla Capacity Planning" classes have been presented at such organizations as America Online (AOL), Boeing, FedEx, Motorola, Nokia, Stanford University, Sun Microsystems and UCLA. In 1996, Dr. Gunther was awarded Best Technical Paper at the Computer Measurement Group international conference (CMG'96) and at CMG'08 he received the prestigious A.A. Michelson Award---the industry's highest honor for computer performance analysis and capacity planning. Dr. Gunther is also a member of AMS, APS, ACM and SPIE. More details can be found on his Wiki page.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 273 pages
• Publisher: Springer; 1 edition (December 19, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 3540261389
• ISBN-13: 978-3540261384
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.2 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #939,723 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #28 in Books > Computers & Technology > Business & Culture > Careers

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A useful introduction to the scalability of parallel computing, September 12, 2010

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Photo/Video Gearhead - See all my reviews

This review is from: Guerrilla Capacity Planning: A Tactical Approach to Planning for Highly Scalable Applications and Services (Hardcover)

Neil Gunther has undertaken an important work, that of teaching to IT professionals the basics of measuring and modeling the scalability of parallel computer systems. The model that he develops in his book is a useful starting point; however, this model fails to provide a sufficiently general basis for modeling the behavior of the wide variety of extant parallel computer systems.

The "universal scalability model" that he describes in section 4.4, and for which he provides figure 4.8 and equation 4.31, extends Amdahl's Law via the addition of a "coherency" term that models effects such as data exchange between parallel processes. And although Gunther suggests that this coherency term ought to grow linearly with the number of parallel processes, and hence should appear as a quadratic term in equation 4.31, this coherency term depends on the specific communication architecture of the computer system and can grow non-linearly.

For example, in a distributed memory architecture such as a cluster of compute nodes, coherency effects may grow linearly with the number of processors due to communication between the compute nodes. However, in a shared memory architecture, coherency effects may grow by the logarithm of the number of processors because one processor may not communicate directly with all other processors. Instead, one processor may send information to two other processors, and each of those two processors may send information to two more processors, and so forth. Therefore, in order to model the communication that occurs in a shared memory architecture, the quadratic n(n-1) coherency term in equation 4.31 should be replaced by a n*log(n) term.

In addition to the above example, I have obtained performance data for other parallel computer systems for which the universal scalability model fails to model adequately the scalability for a variety of different reasons. Thus, although Gunther's book is a useful introduction to the subject of measuring and modeling the behavior of parallel computer architectures, his universal scalability model should not be considered to be universal. Instead, that model is a useful starting point for modeling the behavior of a parallel computer architecture.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Who does this better?, March 14, 2007

By 

Ted C "Ted" (Phila PA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Guerrilla Capacity Planning: A Tactical Approach to Planning for Highly Scalable Applications and Services (Hardcover)

I've read the other reviews and they seem to ignore the "Guerrilla" concept. The fact that scientific analysis is ignored and decisions made on perceived knowledge in most companies for me is the key to the book. Excel is a great way to get the performance point across even with precision errors. Getting management buy in is 99% of the process. GCP makes that argument simple. Read this book and get the word out. Performance is not linear!

5.0 out of 5 stars Great coverage of Capacity Planning and Performance Management, August 24, 2008

By 

WIETZE A. DEVRIES "Wi7ard" (Richmond, VA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Guerrilla Capacity Planning: A Tactical Approach to Planning for Highly Scalable Applications and Services (Hardcover)

Very readable coverage of Capacity Planning and Performance Management. Doesn't presume any previous knowledge, but doesn't talk down either. Several good chapters talking about queueing theory.
A great practical handbook.