Capacity Management is all about ensuring adequate performance to meet service level targets as demands change.
The critical activity in Service Delivery activities is Capacity Management. Unique amongst ITIL processes, with its concentration on looking at the future rather than just the past, Capacity Management is all about ensuring adequate performance to meet service level targets as demands change.
All of the ITIL processes need to interact with Capacity Management to ensure the successful provision of IT services and all have a direct dependency on Capacity Management in order for them to be successfully carried out.
For example, Service Level Management depends on Capacity Management to show that service targets will continue to be met as the workload changes over time. Change Management depends on Capacity Management to show that changes can be implemented without adversely affecting service levels. Problem Management needs data from Capacity Management to identify performance problems at an early stage so action can be taken to prevent them, a cheaper option than fixing problems when a crisis occurs.
Capacity Management can be justified in a number of ways - deferred expenditure on hardware; fewer capacity crises causing downtime or slow performance; information to support negotiation with suppliers; less staff time wasted in firefighting problems, among others.
Increasing the effectiveness with which virtualization technology is deployed is a good example.
Take a calculation from VMware’s ROI (Return On Investment) calculator which shows a prediction that for a given population of 500 physical servers, they can potentially be ‘collapsed’ onto 48 virtual servers, a collapse ratio of 10.4:1.
Capacity management offers techniques to assess if this plan can be improved. A small increase in the collapse ratio will mean significant real financial savings for an organization. If, for example, the collapse ratio could be increased to 15:1, this could be worth £1.25m over three years to your organization.
This is likely to be quite realistic as Supplier plans of this type tend to be conservative, aiming to avoid capacity issues by an element of over-provisioning.
Our extensive experience shows that such plans can usually be improved without any adverse impact on the service delivered to the business.
Whatever the driver for doing Capacity Management effectively, analyst groups such as Gartner and Forrester, and good practice guidelines such as ITIL® all recommend that it is done from a business perspective.
To achieve this, any supporting tools need to cover all of your infrastructure and provide the capability to bring unique business data into the capacity mix.
athene® has that capability...take a look at our website for more information
Andrew Smith
Chief Sales & Marketing Officer
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