Capacity Management is the discipline that ensures IT infrastructure is provided at the right time in the right volume at the right price, and ensuring that IT is used in the most efficient manner.  This involves input from many areas of the business to identify what services are (or will be) required, what IT infrastructure is required to support these services, what level of Contingency will be needed, and what the cost of this infrastructure will be.

Many inputs are needed for a robust Capacity Management processes, including:

  • Performance monitoring
  • Workload monitoring
  • Application sizing
  • Resource forecasting
  • Demand forecasting
  • Modelling

From these processes come the results of capacity management, being the capacity plan itself, forecasts, tuning data and Service Level Management guidelines.  But how do you achieve this?  And perhaps more importantly, how do you achieve this optimally? ITIL is a great start, but it doesn’t describe enough detail.  Sure, monitoring and feedback are 101 for the capacity planner, but is this adequate?

It should not be just efficient, it should be most effective.  Capacity (and performance) are all about matching resource consumption with demand.  But are CPU and “Available Memory” really the only resources to watch?  A typical Windows server may capture 1000 metrics (via SYSMON); similar for Unix and mainframe hosts.  At the same time, hardware/software licences must be noted for end-of-life as well as running costs while at the same time predicting user demand.

It’s not possible for humans to juggle these numbers with only spreadsheets – luckily this is what computers are good at.  The key to a good capacity plan is to use computers – and the appropriate algorithms - to calculate these numbers for you.

According to Wikipedia, forecasting is all about time-series (see ARMA or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box-Jenkins). Further, cost optimisation is a well known problem usually solved via linear programming (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplex_algorithm).  

If your system isn’t optimised, if you haven’t optimised your costs against your demand, you are losing money.

 

Talk to us today about your Capacity Management requirements