Planning and Provisioning

Proper planning and provisioning for IT services provides many key business value benefits, including the very practical matter of providing services that meet performance and scaling expectations once they are launched. A regimented process for preparing critical services for production saves time and money down the road, and ensures successful application roll-outs.

Planning and provisioning include these business benefits:

• Accurate provisioning, avoiding wasteful and expensive over-provisioning
• Stacking applications, making better use of existing IT resources
• Reducing outages and slowdowns, ensuring service-level objectives are met under varying conditions
• Aligning IT with business objectives, prioritizing IT services by criticality
• Avoiding crises and firefighting, proactively planning for peaks in demand

Capacity Planning Techniques for Planning and Provisioning

The judicious use of capacity planning techniques to plan and provision services can help prevent performance fires after services are launched, freeing human resources that would otherwise be spent troubleshooting. Capacity planning also identifies optimal hardware requirements and ensures service-level objectives can be met under peak demands.

Capacity planning techniques can be used for:

• Predeployment scalability testing
• Predicting service performance under varying demands
• Identifying optimal hardware configurations to support services
• Controlling costs through accurate provisioning

Capacity planning techniques include trending, simulation modeling and analytical modeling. Each technique is useful in different situations. Analytical modeling is recommended for planning and provisioning services.

Read more on capacity planning techniques