Effective
capacity management can offer immediate savings for organizations. For some, it
can reduce their hardware and software budget by 20-30%.
Due to organizations
needing to reduce expenses, IT infrastructure management is
increasing to help companies cut costs. Here, we’re showing you how you can
implement capacity management to help keep IT costs to a minimum. Use these steps
to achieve better capacity management.
#1 Define Your Scope
Your capacity
management project is defined by the resources you want to manage. Each set is
designated in “pools”.
For example, managing
disk space is one capacity pool. Each category must be listed in a separate
capacity pool. Make sure you don’t extend your scope beyond capacity pools that
don’t offer value for your organization. You must understand your organization
well enough to manage only the things that return real value.
#2 Gather Trend Data
Now that you
know what to manage, it’s time to understand how to manage it. You may have a
tool already for gathering capacity statistics whichcan forward them to a
central database. If not, collect technical level details for each capacity pool.
The key is getting data from each pool and ensuring it flows to one centralized
location.
Once you have
the data, observe the trends. Document trends over time for each pool to
understand whether utilization is growing or shrinking.
#3 Make Your Predictions
Once you see
trends, you’re on your way to solid IT infrastructure management. The next step
is using the trend data to make your predictions. You may notice your server
utilization is growing at 4% per month which allows you to predict the server
will be out of capacity in eight months.
Take your
predictions beyond simple mathematics to combine other knowledge such as knowing
a new program will increase percentages even higher in coming months. The more
you can predict future utilization, the more valuable your capacity management
program will be.
#4 Scale Up and Out
The next
challenge is deciding how much memory to add and determining when the memory
will run out again. This is referred to as scaling up and scaling out.
Scaling up is
adding more resources within an environment such as bandwidth to a network link
or memory to a server. Scaling out is duplicating portions of the environment
to add more resources such as adding another network link or server. These
methodsincrease capacity and each resourcecan impact how you make future
capacity utilization predictions.
#5 Organize & Share Data
By now you have
lots of data about your capacity pools. To organize it all, a Capacity
Management Information System (CMIS) should become your source for capacity
readings, trends, and predictions. Establishing a CMIS allows others in the
company to make better business decisions by using the data.
#6 Make Capacity Plans
A capacity plan
offers an analysis of your data and recommendations for what to do with it.
These plans are built for important applications, IT services, and IT infrastructure
management. The goal is to avoid running out of capacity without buying and
deploying more capacity than needed.A capacity plan includes data trends,
predictions, and recommendations for what to do.
#7 Develop Service Capacity
Management
To this point,
you’ve managed component capacity at the lowest level. As you successfully
manage components, you may start managing IT services involving complex sets of
components with business value. An IT service may include a set of servers and
applications that support product design. Tracking trends and measuring
utilization is easier at the component level and much more complex with IT
service. While important, the lack of quality tools in this area has lead
business to decide service capacity management is too expensive
to implement.
Start with the
basics and work your way up to achieve full capacity management. Take a systematic approach to realize the potential and cost savings
it can offer your company.
Need help? At Datera, we help companies achieve
better IT infrastructure management. Contact us today to learn more.
