My blog series outlines some thoughts about establishing capacity management in your organization.
A major concentration is the differentiation between capacity management and related activities such as monitoring and provisioning.
As you’ll see, I strongly believe that capacity management is all about getting your eyes raised from any immediate day to day crises and concentrating on getter longer term capacity provisioning correct. Especially in today’s hurly-burly roll in, roll out of virtual systems, short term decisions about provisioning are being mistaken for strategic capacity planning and management.
1. Strategic Capacity Management and its objectives
Strategic Capacity Management and its objectives
Day to day system administration tasks are technical and don’t necessarily need alignment with business needs. Longer term capacity issues around managing costs, service quality and expectations do.
A major concentration is the differentiation between capacity management and related activities such as monitoring and provisioning.
As you’ll see, I strongly believe that capacity management is all about getting your eyes raised from any immediate day to day crises and concentrating on getter longer term capacity provisioning correct. Especially in today’s hurly-burly roll in, roll out of virtual systems, short term decisions about provisioning are being mistaken for strategic capacity planning and management.
The overall flow of my successive blogs is:
2. Things you will need for capacity management
….and things you don’t need
3. Things that will make capacity management harder to do
4. …..and things that will make it easier to achieve
There have been many definitions of capacity management over the years, but despite changing technology, the core is still best expressed within initiatives such as ITIL, with wording along the following lines:
The continuing provision of consistent, acceptable service levels, at a known and controlled cost.
So what does this definition mean for the would-be capacity manager?
(a) ‘Acceptable service levels’
• Given a requirement to support a given workload at a given service level, derive the resources required
• Given a set of resources and a workload level, define the service levels that will be provided
• Given a set of resources and a service level requirement, define the workload levels that can be supported
All capacity management questions you get asked by management or the business will effectively be one of these three issues, however expressed.
(b) ‘Continuing provision’
This means that it is not sufficient merely to ensure that current performance is satisfactory. Capacity management is not about ‘current’ provisioning, it’s about ‘continuing’ resource requirements. Resolving a short term performance crisis or adding a new VM in response to a user request is system administration. Knowing what overall resources and how they will need to be configured best to support all provisioning requests for the next six months is capacity management. Somewhere there is a grey line where the ‘here and now’ becomes ‘the future need’. Finding this grey line and learning how to manage it is where assistance from external experts, such as Metron, will help.
(c) ‘At a known and controlled cost’
This means that a mechanism must be provided which will define the required resources
to support a given workload at a given service level. This takes us to where capacity management interfaces with the business. Day to day system administration tasks are technical and don’t necessarily need alignment with business needs. Longer term capacity issues around managing costs, service quality and expectations do.
On Wednesday I’ll take a look at what thoughts and processes you need to start putting in place to make capacity management effective.
In the meantime feel free to browse and download white papers on capacity management by joining our Metron community
Andrew Smith
Chief Sales & Marketing Officer
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