IT Capacity Planning

The goal of capacity planning is to identify the right amount of resources required to meet service demands now and in the future. It is a proactive discipline with far-reaching impact, supporting:

• IT and business alignment, helping to show the cost and business need for infrastructure upgrades;
• Consolidation and virtualization strategies, ensuring that consolidated real and virtual system configurations will meet service levels,
• Green initiatives, facilitating the optimization of power requirements;
• ITIL processes, because capacity planning is one the hallmarks of mature IT management processes;
• Purchasing decisions, minimizing costs needed to maximize productivity;
• Application development, predicting the impact on production systems of new or modified applications;
• Disaster recovery plans, determining the optimal way to handle workloads after a catastrophe at one of your data centers;
• And more...

The benefits are pervasive, and the effects are game-changing. IT organizations become more productive, spending less time fighting fires and more time proactively thwarting performance issues before users are impacted. A more agile IT emerges from understanding current and future resource needs. Budgeting is more disciplined and costs are controlled. The IT organization exhibits value and a competitive edge recognized - and appreciated - by the business.

Capacity Planning...Who Benefits?

Business

• Increase revenue through maximum availability, decreased downtime, improved response times, greater productivity, greater responsiveness to market dynamics, greater return on existing IT investment
• Decrease costs through higher capacity utilization, more efficient processes, just-in-time upgrades, greater cost control

CIOs

• Control infrastructure costs and stay within budget
• Make informed decisions by understanding cost vs benefit tradeoffs for various configuration options
• Negotiate service levels with business units knowing the resources required to meet them
• Provide input to business decisions regarding costs of supporting various services
• Make informed purchasing decisions based on business impact
• Support business unit goals with minimum risk
• Objectively double check the recommendations of your vendors

IT Managers

• Meet all SLAs without over-provisioning (which wastes money and consumes limited space)
• Report performance and capacity status to business unit managers in business terms
• Migrate to newer technology efficiently and with confidence
• Consolidate and virtualize servers to save on costs, space and energy consumption
• Provide objective proof to your management regarding the business need for infrastructure upgrades

Capacity Planning from TeamQuest Corporation

Forrester Research, Inc. recognizes TeamQuest as a tier-one provider of capacity planning software. Our specialization in Capacity Management allows an unrelenting focus on advancing capacity planning techniques and capabilities, simplifying for users a sophisticated, important discipline.

In fact, the latest release of TeamQuest software offers exciting advances in capacity planning, including smoother, slicker cross-platform modeling, more intricate modeling of multithreaded platforms, and much more.

The following chart discusses a variety of capacity planning techniques, each useful in its own right.

Simple trend analysis looks at historical data and projects a linear trend line into the future.

Pros

Can be accomplished without sophisticated modeling tools.

Cons

Does not consider non-linear behavior buried within most complex multi-tiered systems. Does not allow for experimentation with different configurations.

TeamQuest Software

Can graph a trend line and can generate alarm events when performance varies significantly from a projected trend.

Stress testing typically involves sending synthetic transactions coming from imaginary end users to test systems to be certain they can support required service levels.

Pros

Can spot non-linear bottlenecks that would be missed using simple trending.

Cons

Stress testing can be time consuming and expensive. It can also miss important problems if the test environment is missing some workloads that would be present in the production environment or if the test systems are smaller than production systems. Experimenting with alternative configurations requires real changes to the test environment.

TeamQuest Software

Tracks performance during stress testing so that you can tell if service levels are being met. TeamQuest software can also extend the results of stress testing, allowing you to predict performance using different workloads and configurations than might be available in the test environment.

Discrete event simulation, a more sophisticated capacity planning technique, actually simulates the queuing events that occur during execution.

Pros

Much more accurate than simple trending. Accounts for non-linear behavior. Allows for predicting performance on hypothetical configurations.

Cons

Can be very time-consuming and tedious to build and run the models.

TeamQuest Software

Includes simulation modeling capability, though our customers generally prefer and TeamQuest usually recommends the use of our analytic modeling capability for most situations.

Analytic modeling uses mathematics to calculate how a queuing network will perform. To use analytic modeling, a baseline set of measurements is taken on a system and a model is then built and calibrated based on a description of the system. Once the model is built, hypothetical changes can be made to system configuration or business workloads, and the model will predict how the changes will affect performance.

Pros

Many of the same advantages as simulation modeling, but faster and easier.

Cons

One of the reasons that analytic models are simpler, faster, and easier to set up and use is that they are not completely generalized. If they were, they would suffer from the same drawbacks as simulation models.

TeamQuest Software

Features a versatile analytic modeling tool called TeamQuest Predictor. TeamQuest Predictor can predict the performance of complex, multi-tiered computing environments that include systems from different vendors running a wide variety of operating systems. TeamQuest Predictor understands and takes into consideration a long list of variables including I/O configurations and CPU types and numbers. It understands multi-threaded processing and a growing list of partitioned or virtualized environments. Chances are, TeamQuest is the right tool for your capacity planning needs.