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Quick. Provide the business value of capacity planning.

Capacity planning tools help businesses grow by minimizing availability outages due to capacity or performance reasons and help maintain or improve the customer experience.

By doing more with existing assets, improving services and optimizing costs, capacity planning can bring wanted attention from management and the business.

The next time management asks "What have you done for me lately," tell them...

Doing More with Existing Assets
IT organizations are under extensive pressure as they struggle to control operating and capital costs while meeting stricter service requirements. While the computing environment is expanding and becoming more complex, the resources and budget to manage it are, in many cases, diminishing. IT organizations need to find ways to realize higher productivity from existing staff, increase utilization of the existing infrastructure, and reduce acquisition, implementation and management costs for their IT systems.

Capacity planning can identify opportunities to use idle capacity. Let’s say you have unused capacity between 1 a.m. and 5 a.m. Capacity planning determines what type of work could be moved. Capacity convinces customers to change habits and move work to the lesser used timeframes or work with the finance organization to modify chargeback rates to incent users to move the work.

Performance tuning makes existing applications perform better, provide better service to customers, and use fewer resources. All this is accomplished with some staff time, minimal tools expense and cooperation of the application teams.

Improving Service
Integrating new applications into your server environment entails considerable risk. In order to prepare critical applications for production, you need a way to determine the optimal system configuration and to validate readiness for the workload stress of your production environment.

When rolling out a new application, there are two ways to determine what IT infrastructure will be needed to host the application in production:

• Try it out on actual hardware using a simulated production-level workload
• Try it out on a scaled down version of the hardware using a scaled down simulation of the production-level workload followed by capacity modeling to determine how to optimally configure production systems to handle the production-level workload.

Capacity and performance teams can analyze historical usage data and use it to predict the levels at which slowdowns or bottlenecks will occur. Actions can then be commissioned so work is completed before customers are adversely impacted.

In fact, capacity and performance teams can be involved with application testing, measuring before and after performance, and resource usage. If new changes use more resources than planned or will perform poorly, corrective actions can be taken before changes are introduced into production and before users are impacted.

Optimizing Costs
According to Gartner senior vice president of research Peter Sondergaard, $8 out of $10 spent on IT is "dead" money. He suggests that successful companies are spending money on IT resources that propel business growth.

Capacity planning optimizes costs and helps grow the business by determining the different resource requirements that satisfy the different levels of service. The costs can then be associated with each level, permitting management to better understand the trade-offs between service and cost.

In addition, when involved at design time with new applications, capacity planners can use their tools to better predict resource usage. Implementation and ongoing support costs can be better understood so management can make more informed decisions on the viability of new applications.