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

Neil J. Gunther (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 19, 2006 | ISBN-10: 3540261389 | ISBN-13: 978-3540261384 | Edition: 2007

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; 2007 edition (December 19, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 3540261389
• ISBN-13: 978-3540261384
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 0.7 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #906,978 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #31 in Books > Computers & Technology > Business & Management > Careers

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

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

By Photo/Video Gearhead

Format:Hardcover

Dr. 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 current parallel computer systems.

The "universal scalability law" 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 Dr. 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, as log to the base two of the number of processes.

This logarithmic growth law may occur 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 such a communication cascade, the quadratic n(n-1) coherency term in equation 4.31 should be replaced by an n*log(n) term.

Moreover, performance data that are obtained from current parallel computer systems do not always conform to Dr. Gunther's "universal" scalability "law" under other conditions. For example, a large volume of data that exceeds the capacity of the total cache memory when distributed across a few processors may well fit into total cache memory when distributed across a larger number of processors. Under these conditions, the scalability for the larger number of processors appears to grow "super-linearly" relative to the scalability of a few processors. However, Dr. Guther's model specifically disallows this "super-linear" scaling that is commonly observed. Thus, although Dr. Gunther's book is a useful introduction to the subject of measuring and modeling the behavior of parallel computer architectures, his universal scalability law should not be considered to be universal.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful

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

By WIETZE A. DEVRIES

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

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.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Enlightening, however ... March 11, 2007

By Canberra CCIE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

First of all, this book was worth the money I spent on it. I came away from reading this book with a clear understanding of the differences between speed and scale, and with a system for modelling the scalability of systems in general.

However... really all of this value was in the first quarter of the book. I read on and read on looking for further conceptual gems but they weren't to be found.

I guess that books are "meant" to be at least a particular length, but this one could have been much shorter and more concise.