Availability and Capacity Management: A Case Study Analysis

This presentation analyzes the failure of availability and capacity management, using the Citibank case as a primary example. It begins by highlighting the consequences of inadequate management, such as poor incident management, increased costs, and lack of service assurance. The presentati...Read More

Availability
Management
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Introduction
• Availability and Capacity Management remains
critical to the success of the organization.
• As seen in the Citibank, the failure of sufficient availability
management resulted in various negative effects.
• Thus, this paper analyses the case of Citibank to
appreciate the importance of availability and capacity
management in an organization.

Consequences Of Inadequate Availability And
Capacity Management
• Poor Incident Management: Information
Technology (IT) operations perform unnecessary
unplanned tasks because of non-predicted performance
concerns that affect vital applications, rather than
forecasting, planning before and utilizing resources
effectively.

Consequences Of Inadequate Availability And
Capacity Management Cont.
• Lack of cost-reduction: The lack of availability and
capacity management leads to oversized applications in
the datacentre which leads to increased cost to the
organization. Such applications reserve more resources
compared to what they really required.

Consequences Of Inadequate Availability
And Capacity Management Cont.
• Lack of service assurance: As seen in the case of
Citibank, there was no service assurance due to
insufficient availability and capacity management since
the service was never kept running.
• Thus, availability and capacity management ensures that
applications meet their levels of service which was never
the case in Citibank.

Define Availability Management
• According to IEC or ISO, availability is defined as the ability of a
service or a constituent to perform its assigned function when needed.
• Availability Management (AM) has specifically two major emphases:
Infrastructure constituents that are needed in meeting all the service
level agreement or SLA in the firm and the infrastructure constituents
needed for supporting the critical business functions of the
organization (Kolinska, Sliwczynski, Hadas and Kolinski 2018).
• Availability is thus described as the proportion of time that a specific
service stays available as opposed to its anticipated service time

Overview a Process for Designing Availability
• The IT system has to be a sound availability pan to evade the
loss of service via a reduction or management of failures and
minimization of planned downtime.
• An effective beginning point for availability design encompass
the services’ identification which has to be available for the
continuity of the business (Ling, Dong, Guo and Liang 2015).
• The following five steps will help Citibank to design an
effective availably.

Overview a Process for
Designing Availability Cont.
• Step 2: Designing both software and hardware
architecture: The availability architecture is involves
cluster of computer s supporting server applications
which are reliably used with a minimum downtime
amount.
• It is operated by utilizing high availability software for
harnessing redundant computers in clusters which give
continued service when components of a system fail.

Discuss How The Business And IT Interface In
Determining The Correct Level Of Availability.
• Both business interface and Information Technology
interface determine the level of availability.
• The business interface gives all the business entails and
this is what availability scope must take into account to be
effective.
• The business interface will determine the IT interface
which together work to determine the correct availability
level.

Role of suppliers in maintaining the availability
of systems
• The suppliers are critical stakeholders in systems availability maintenance.
• Without the suppliers, systems availability would totally fail. The suppliers
will ensure the three key aspects of availability management including
reliability, serviceability and maintainability are guaranteed.
• Reliability is the measure of how long a given service is able to perform
with no interruption while maintainability measures how fast a failed
service will get restored.
• Serviceability measures how effectively third party supplier will deliver its
service. All these aspects must be availed to for sufficient maintenance of
system availability.

Role Of Suppliers In Maintaining
The Availability Of Systems Cont.
• Suppliers are also critical in ensuring proper system
availability maintenance by guaranteeing maintainability
aspect of availability management.
• For a system to be maintained, the organization must be
able to know how it quickly and effectively be restored to its
normal working following a failure (Fitzgerald et al. 2016).
• This will always require immediate supply of components or
any other resources from suppliers.

Conclusion
• In summary, this paper has comprehensively discussed the
case of availability and capacity management failure in
Citibank.
• Through the discussion, the process of availability design,
consequences of inadequate availability, role of suppliers
in maintaining system availability, and how business and
IT interface dictate correct availability level have been
discussed.

References
• Fitzgerald, J.E., Theimer, M.M., Brandwine, E.J., Mercier, B.W. and
Jenkins, J.A., Amazon Technologies Inc, 2016. Capacity availability aware
auto scaling. U.S. Patent 9,448,824.
• Kolinska, K., Sliwczynski, B., Hadas, L. and Kolinski, A., 2018. Analysis Of
Spare Parts In Terms Of Their Availability Management For The
Production Processes Needs. Business Logistics in Modern Management,
pp.191-204.
• Ling, L., Dong, Y., Guo, X. and Liang, L., 2015. Availability management of
hotel rooms under cooperation with online travel agencies. International
Journal of Hospitality Management, 50, pp.145-152.