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December 1998 Systems sizing: Nobody gets it right No matter how sophisticated the sizing models, estimating hardware performance for enterprise resource planning systems is more art than science. By Larry Marion Considering the extent of Rod Ely's pioneering efforts, he has surprisingly few arrows in his back. He is a systems architect at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters of Waterbury, Vt., and one of the first implementers of the manufacturing modules of the PeopleSoft ERP suite. Imagine installing a new enterprise resource planning (ERP) system in your shop and having to increase the clerical staff because of poor systems performance, and you get a sense of what Ely has faced over the past two years. Footnotes Officials from a variety of ERP user organizations, vendors, and consultants offered a host of valuable nuggets of information about hardware sizing in recent interviews: Predicting the batch processing load should not be ignored during an ERP sizing study. Batch loads may be a more important a factor than online requirements, notes Rod Ely of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters. IT managers should set aside 1% to 2% of the implementation budget for stress testing, at a minimum. It's an insurance policy that should be built into the budget, says Kevin Block, a manager and member of the Hewlett-Packard's PeopleSoft Alliance Team. Tuning systems is not for amateurs. You need the A-team that knows the hardware, the database, and the application, not just the hardware or the database, according to an IT manager at a firm who wanted to remain anonymous. Size your expected system load at least three times: when the internal discussions begin, when the ERP system has been configured, and before production roll out, suggests Susan Durrett, manager of IBM's PeopleSoft International Competency Center. You don't want to buy more box than you need, warns Jeanne Bauhart, vice president, enterprise resource solutions, Cambridge Technology Partners. She says the long-term cost of an oversized system can vastly exceed the incremental purchase price of the hardware. Buy hardware that can be easily and dramatically upgraded. And remember that substantial expansion capability is more important than additional processor capacity. Input/Output issues hurt ERP implementations more than poky processors. If your company is growing quickly, there's a 100% chance of undersizing the hardware, warns Lodewijk "Bones" Bonebakker, an applications engineer with Sun Microsystems' office in Amersfoort, the Netherlands. If an organization is new to ERP, it's more likely to undersize its needs, adds "Bones" Bonebakker of Sun Microsystems. If you already have an ERP app running, you're more likely to be able to accurately predict needs. If users can do their own reports and run them whenever they want, no hardware on the planet can accommodate them, notes "Bones" Bonebakker of Sun. Undersizing sometimes is the result of who has the responsibility for the project. A CFO is more likely to go for a low-end machine than a CIO, notes Peter Farrell, VP and general manager of Litton Enterprise Solutions of McLean, Va. During sizing efforts, "we didn't realize how many batch jobs we would need to do," Ely explained to me after a presentation at a recent PeopleSoft user conference. "We just looked at online processing needs." The additional staffing at Green Mountain, along with database and applications fine-tuning and a new four-way Compaq server with Intel's new Xeon processors, will cure the performance ills. Ely is not alone, of course, when it comes to under-estimating the amount of processor horsepower needed to run ERP systems. The consensus of the scores of IT managers I've interviewed over the years, leads me to conclude that every ERP implementation team fails to accurately predict its hardware needs. Unfortunately for IT managers, there are as many reasons for the unpleasant performance surprises as there are servers in their datacenters. Knowing right from wrong Green Mountain endured the pain of being a pioneer--it's hard to determine the required processing power if you're among the first to use a package. Indeed, most organizations new to client/server ERP don't even understand the questions in the vendor sizing questionnaires, let alone know the correct answers. Other common trip wires on the road to accurate systems sizing are scope-creep and heightened user expectations of response times. Furthermore, occasionally you'll be victimized by aggressive vendors submitting low-ball bids in the hope of making their numbers from the follow-up orders. In addition, sometimes preliminary predictions of the reporting needs of individuals in an organization have no relation to financial reality--users want to produce and print hundreds of reports, without realizing the heavy performance penalty of report writing on production systems. Another pitfall is an ass-backwards approach to sizing. Scoping out a business case for the new systems is a critical first step. This should be done before software is selected and hardware studied, warns Jeanne Bauhart, vice president for enterprise resource solutions at Cambridge Technology Partners, a highly regarded implementation firm. "Most ERP buyers buy the software, then they estimate transactions and the number of bodies using it, then they figure the scope of the project (including features and functions), and then they say, 'Oh wow.' That's the wrong order." Here's the right way: After determining the business goals and objectives to be achieved, prioritize the capabilities, features, and functions under consideration, so your organization is in agreement on what it wants to accomplish before it sees the price tags and the feature/function trade-offs among the various software suites. After an organization has mapped packages and priorities and determined which package will best support its business goals, it's ready to look at hardware sizing models. Do your homework Leading hardware vendors and implementation partners will be quick to offer you the use of their sizing models. Be prepared for serious homework--these are not pop quizzes but major essay exams. And while they are useful exercises, they cannot be reliable predictors of your organization's needs and behaviors once an ERP system goes into production. Doing your own stress analysis is a popular option among large shops. Ford Motor earlier this year conducted a four-month evaluation of servers from Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems. It built load-testing scripts and tried other performance prediction techniques. Ford then pushed the vendors as much as possible, since it expects thousands of users of its PeopleSoft human resources modules by the year 2001. Company sources say their stress testing showed that the HP boxes as configured by HP would not be able to handle the worst-case load, so Ford opted for Sun's 6500 line. Over the next few years the company will phase in six machines to provide fail-over protection. | Home page | Cover story | Online ad index | DATAMATION Copyright © 1995-1998. All rights reserved For information on reprints or electronic licensing of this story, call EarthWeb at 212-725-6550