Batch Modelling

Even though the trend is towards online 24x7 applications there are still a vast number of batch suites in today’s ICT installations. These batch suites typically have genuine, important deadlines or service levels that must be met. How will a change in throughput affect the ability to meet these deadlines, how about a change in the schedule or a tuning change? Our batch modelling service helps customers answer these questions.

Need

• Minimise risk of changes to batch
• Predict effect of changes to batch
• Target tuning efforts
• Understand which jobs contribute to the critical path (and other paths)
• Present results graphically

Challenges

• Complexity of schedule
• Large number of individual jobs
• Suites running on more than one platform
• Acquisition of dependency data
• Ownership of issues
• Specific modelling software is expensive

Our Service

Our staff are experienced in analysing batch workloads and in building and using models to be used as predictive and planning tools. The service consists of:

• Model Building
  • Use existing tools – spreadsheet software
  • Automatic creation of Gantt charts (example below)
  • Automatic identification of critical path
  • Modelling of dependencies
  • Modelling of the elapsed time of individual jobs

• What-if scenarios
  • Predict effect of organic growth through time
  • Predict effect of tuning individual jobs
  • Predict effect of changes to individual jobs
  • Predict effect of changes to the schedule/dependencies
  • Predict effect of infrastructure changes
• Tuning targets
  • Identify which jobs contribute the most time to the critical path
  • Give developers targets for job performance to enable the project to successfully negotiate fitness of purpose criteria
  • Useful for validating queuing performance and capacity models

Capacitas can provide staff as and when needed at short notice. Our staff can use existing toolsets or recommend tool purchases as required

Features & Benefits

Delivering Results:

• Reduces the guesswork from batch performance prediction
• Allows projects to meet performance targets
• Increases credibility on the service provision area
• Quicker turnaround of batch prediction requests
• Reduce risk of service availability issues

Flexible Resourcing:

• Multiple staff can be used as-and-when needed, enabling the customer to ramp up and down effort quickly and cost-effectively
• Staff only used when needed; no on-going charges compared to permanent staff or contractors
• Work can be conducted on-site or off-site (e.g. over VPNs) if appropriate

Value-for-Money:

• Our team combines analysts and experienced capacity and performance managers, thereby creating an average daily rate comparable with contract staff
• Complete turn-key solution possible to performance testing using our services

Pragmatic Approach:

• Conduct a risk assessment to identify what does and does not need modelling
• Use scenario planning to determine the required level of accuracy for each input

Service-Focussed Expertise:

• Ability to understand how changes affect service levels
• Ability to explain this to senior management and other audiences at the appropriate level

Example Customers

• PGDS
• HBOS
• Orange

Next Steps

• Review the Resources section on this page
• To email for further information click here
• Call our offices on +44 (0) 20 7841 9950 to arrange a meeting