Growth in any enterprise is a good thing: It means the company is healthy, sales are clicking, and excitement is in the air. As with any positive change in life, however, there are unexpected challenges that arise, including new technical hurdles that can cause headaches for IT. Fortunately, even with growth in the business, there is a way to mitigate problems in the data center, plan for IT scaling, and meet the challenges in a way that does not cause undue consternation. Part of the answer is to have a growth plan in place, one that you implement as a company grows. A second tactic is to move some services to the cloud, which can scale rapidly as you ramp up services.

“As any business grows, the number of servers tends to grow, as does the reliance on those servers,” says Nick Cavalancia, vice president of Windows Management for ScriptLogic (www.scriptlogic.com), a server management company. “Terms like SLA are heard on a daily basis and focus changes from implementing cool technologies to supporting them and keeping them running.”

Cavalancia says there is a two-pronged approach to troubleshooting growth issues in a small to midsized enterprise: The first approach is better monitoring of servers and other services, and the second is building an adequate response to those changes that are monitored. Cavalancia says IT departments should use their own expertise in managing a data center to manage growth.

Troubleshooting Growth Problems

The “problem” of growth is a bit hard to grasp. All growth is good, and better sales and expansion of the core business likely means more resources and more funds to deal with IT expansion. Yet, according to Leon Thomas, president and CEO of consulting firm Jelecos, growth also means IT must ramp up in many different areas to meet the new demand. This includes such seemingly innocuous areas as cable management, heat dissipation for new servers, power capacity in the data center and requirements for local utility companies, and compliance issues.

Thomas says the best strategies for dealing with this new growth are considering virtualization, developing new standards for documentation and other policies that govern use of IT services, surveying which service providers exist to help with the new growth, and analyzing IT best practices to make sure staff can deal with the unexpected growth and react accordingly.

He also notes that moving some IT services to the cloud can help a company in the middle of a quick growth period. However, Thomas says, the cloud is not necessarily a one-size-fits-all answer, and companies should be diligent about determining exactly which services need to grow, when they should grow, and when IT should start leveling off those services, as it is easy to expand and scale beyond what you need.

Thomas says the strategies for handling growth differ depending on the amount of resource capacity you want in reserve. “For example, a faster-growth company would purchase enough capacity to enable at least a year of growth support, depending on the systems and technology,” he says. With that in mind, admins should look at areas of potential growth and plan accordingly. “If there is a possibility of unexpected growth, a manager would want to model the scenarios,” he explains. “What if our bandwidth and storage requirements increased 4x next month? Could we handle it? What would it mean to our overall plan? Is the business aware of the capital expense and operating expense implications?”

Interestingly, this balancing act of ramping up services, but not to the point that they exceed the actual demand for services, is a process that requires continual analysis and good management, even in the midst of the new growth. Adding too many servers, for example, has an impact on the cooling requirements, space constraints, and overall management chores.

Other Challenges With Growth

Growth presents a number of challenges to IT departments, chief among them being that there is simply more that needs managing—more equipment, more employees, and more security issues, to name a few. Even something as small as cable management can lead to problems down the line. Employee education is key to making sure new systems and processes work properly, and performing extensive testing before deploying new solutions can cut down on your troubleshooting load later on. Finally, it’s vital to establish a system for tracking and managing problems that arise once your new employees or equipment is in place.

“Growth leads to a range of new challenges for the IT manager,” says Paul Salazar, a general manager at OTRS (www.otrs.com), an open-source help desk company. “What might have been managed on the back of an envelope in the past, or as a casual hallway conversation between a user and a sysadmin, now requires a more formalized system of tracking and managing.”

In the end, IT can respond to company growth by using better management practices, scaling out to the cloud for some services, looking closely at expansion options, avoiding over-scaling, and examining all of the minor details that often became major hurdles.

by John Brandon