Drive IT Efficiency with Capacity Management

Cost reduction, energy and personnel resources, virtualization and cloud computing are making so much noise in IT circles and data centers that most IT professionals have missed the one discipline that can calm the din of directives - capacity management.

All of these directives are associated with efficiency. According to a survey conducted by Forrester on behalf of TeamQuest, the first element of improving overall IT efficiency is centered on cost reduction through infrastructure improvements, leading to a better use of energy and personnel resources.

The second element of efficiency improvement is in maintaining or improving the quality of IT services supporting the business users, according to the survey.

A solid capacity management process can:

• Increase user satisfaction
• Improve business workforce productivity
• Improve IT efficiency
• Reduce the cost of fighting performance issues
• Reduce the business impact and costs

Reactive vs Proactive
IT professionals understand that it's best to stay ahead of the game. Reacting to performance issues after-the-fact doesn't help the business meet its objectives and can degrade the trust built between IT and the business.

In the Forrester study, nearly 50 percent of the online survey respondents said they need to:

• Improve reactive processes
• Reduce infrastructure administration workload
• Improve predictive processes such as capacity management

The key drivers for improving IT efficiency were being able to deliver the expected quality of service while reducing the budgets and at the lowest possible cost.

The best tools allow you to move toward a more mature capacity management environment. As business forecasts, technology and other factors change over time, those changes must be incorporated into revised capacity plans.

Adjusting capacity requirements is important to ensuring that risk levels align with business priorities. If a critical service shows substantial growth in demand, capacity plans should be adjusted to reduce the risk of falling short of service-level requirements, allow for unexpected spikes, and ensure uninterrupted quality of service.

Adding Virtual Environments
You've heard about the issues associated with managing virtual environments. Most of the issues are coming from the application containers losing the direct visibility of the clock interrupt that governs many data collection agents, according to the Forrester study.

Major challenges associated with managing performance in a virtual environment include:

• Performance problems are more difficult to resolve
• Server size needed to support the virtual container is difficult to evaluate
• Performance and workload of application virtualization candidate is difficult to assess

The reason nearly 60 percent of respondents said performance issues are more difficult to resolve in a virtual environment is that they didn't understand the potential resource conflicts between applications before consolidation.

The right capacity management software can help you understand how the virtual servers are behaving relative to each other and to the hypervisor.

Avoid embarrassment from overworked virtual servers and know in advance how many virtual servers you can realistically place on a particular configuration of a physical server. With the right tools, you can predict how long current configurations will perform adequately, and know when upgrades or additional systems will be needed in a heterogeneous environment.

Predictive Analysis
Delivering reliable services and doing more with less will be part of the business and IT lexicon for awhile. The headaches associated with these phrases can be alleviated with proper capacity management.

This discipline should be considered as a way to improve IT efficiency and sustain service levels while optimizing the administration costs, energy, and problem resolution.