Management Decision Problem

Capacity Planning for Electronic Commerce

1 .       Your company implemented its own electronic commerce site using its own hardware and software, and business is growing rapidly. The company Web site has not experienced any outages, and customers are always able to have requests for information or purchase transactions processed very rapidly. Your information systems department has instituted a formal operations review program that continuously monitors key indicators of system usage that affect processing capacity and response time. The following report for management illustrates two of those indicators, daily CPU usage and daily I/O usage for the system. I/O usage measures the number of times a disk has been read.

Please see "Management Decision Problem File - CPU_Usage_Graph.xls"

Your server supports primarily U.S. customers who access the Web site during the day and early evening. I/O usage should be kept below 70 percent if the CPU is very busy so that the CPU does not waste machine cycles looking for data. I/O usage is high between 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. because the firm backs up its data stored on disk when the CPU is not busy.

  1. Anticipated e-commerce business over the next year is expected to increase CPU usage and I/O usage by 20 percent between 1:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. and by 10 percent during the rest of the day. Does your company have enough processing capacity to handle this increased load?
  2. What would happen if your organization did not attend to capacity issues?
  3. Modify the spreadsheet to support your conclusion and create a graph of the new anticipated usage values.
  4. State your conclusion in a word document or as text within your spreadsheet or graph