Second, schedule your deployments for slow times, but avoid doing installations immediately before or during holidays. That may seem obvious, but unfortunately the practice is alive and well in some organizations. Your IT group would surely not appreciate being dragged away from Thanksgiving dinner to fix a problem that could have been caught the week before or after.
And perform the same type of monitoring in deployment that you performed during testing, scrutinizing resource utilization and contention levels. In some cases, it might expose a critical weakness in the system that went undetected during testing. You may need to roll back to the previous software release of your server or network device to fix any bugs or performance flaws you find during deployment. Be prepared to yank the rollout and retrench if things start to go south.
Computer Measurement Group www.cmg.org. A nonprofit professional association that conducts research on topics such as queuing theory, which helps IT develop strategies for managing high-volume systems. CMG holds annual conferences and publishes member-provided papers and newsletters.
The Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis www.caida.org. A nonprofit organization that provides reports and tools on performance management in the Internet and in private IP networks.
Microsoft "Duwamish Online" papers www.msdn.microsoft.com. Although these papers focus on Microsoft-related implementation issues, several of them apply to almost any performance-planning project.
Product-specific implementation guides. Most software vendors provide planning guides and white papers for their high-end database, groupware, Web and other server products. IBM, Microsoft and Novell, for instance, all have numerous deployment guides for their high-end products.
