Newsletters

Analysts, reporters and decision makers aren't spending much time discussing the merits of capacity planning. The onslaught of virtualization software has influenced many to believe it's time to shelve capacity planning tools in favor of virtualization software. With estimates as high as 80 percent for server virtualization awareness and adoption, some would believe the end is near for capacity planning.

Technologies such as VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler, IBM Workload Manager, Capacity on Demand and Utility computing automate many of the routine tasks associated with performance management.

"While these technologies help us manage our existing environments," says Ruble, "they simply cannot replace the need for capacity planning. They don’t tell us what we need. They don’t understand your business goals. They don’t help you accurately plan for future business requirements."

Marketing messages permeating the industry include intelligent dynamic resource allocation, continuously balanced computing capacity, real time server utilization optimization and automated dynamic reconfiguration, explains Ruble.

"Don’t let your CIO be influenced by these types of marketing messages," emphasizes Ruble.

"Their tools may be automated, but they are ultimately reactive and limited in functionality. These sorts of marketing messages may be convincing your CIO that capacity planning is becoming obsolete. Is your boss buying into it? Is it getting more difficult to convince your management that capacity planning is still the smart way to go?"

Speak in Business Terms
Capacity planning is the solution to many of the problems faced by CIOs. How do you convey that message? Gain their attention by speaking their language.

"While you may know all about capacity planning," says Ruble, "don't expect the business managers or the CIO to understand what it is or how it adds value. It's up to you to make them aware of the fact that capacity planning translates business objectives into infrastructure requirements and infrastructure utilizations into business costs."

Common pain points understood by the CIO include virtualization, rapid change, consolidation and right-sizing applications. How does capacity planning solve these issues?

In Ruble's opinion, capacity planning helps IT talk in a language that the business can understand. It is the ultimate tool for aligning IT with business.

"What capacity planners do is turn business requirements into technology decisions, response time into productivity, and IT resource utilizations into costs to the business. By offering business managers with the information they need in order to make informed decisions based on the priorities of the business, technical choices are transformed into obvious business choices."

For example, a large insurance firm demanded a response time of 1.5 seconds for a new application. Using TeamQuest Model, the firm's capacity planner discovered that this solution would cost $15 million.

Additional modeling revealed a 3-second response time would cost $12 million and a 5-second response time would cost $10 million.

Management received this information and took a second look at their original response time request, concluding that it was better to accept a short delay than to pay an extra $3 million for a fast response.

"Your job is to show that sound capacity planning techniques take the guesswork out of accommodating future business workloads," says Ruble. "They provide repeatable and reliable techniques for predicting future infrastructure needs."

Work with the Business
Critical to the success is engaging the business in the process. Capacity planners must take the initiative to understand business goals and become familiar with them.

Interview business clients, study the annual report, analyze business plans, and listen when the CEO or other business executives hold briefings. Capacity planners who follow these tactics will be better able to help the business prioritize its functions.

"In reality, capacity planning is more important than it has ever been," says Ruble. "There is no better way to solve the real-world problems of the CIO."