Coming down to the last month of the year, most people are thinking about spending time with their family and what kind of gifts they should get for their loved ones. While there are still some people that are hesitant on purchasing goods online, the convenience of shopping in your PJ’s is definitely taking over. According to statistics, the top 3 spending days are Cyber Monday, Green Monday (who knew this existed?) and Free Shipping Day (another day I’ve never heard of). While shoppers love the ease and convenience, online retailers have to be absolutely sure they can handle the influx of shoppers.
The issue outlined is essentially what capacity planning is all about. We have discussed capacity at length through a number of posts (See related posts below). But what if even after doing your due diligence and you still didn’t have enough capacity? How can you be agile so you can meet the demands of the screaming shoppers? For the users running VMware with vCenter Orchestrator, you can easily integrate it with up.time so if up.time detects an outage or degraded performance, Orchestrator can easily spin up more instances to lighten the load of your servers. Even if you aren’t using VMware, you can still use Action Profiles to assist in automating the increase of capacity with up.time!
As the statistics show, those of you in retail will probably be smiling this time of the year. However, if you are not properly managing your capacity, it could be a disaster.
Happy holidays everyone! 
-Patrick
Related Capacity Planning posts:
Key to Capacity Planning is Knowledge
Never Run Out of Disk Space Again with Capacity Management
Cradle To The Grave – Virtualization Capacity Management
Tags: automation, Capacity Planning, e-commerce, holiday, VMware, Vmware Orchestrator
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