Wednesday, 8 July 2015

Capacity Management: Operational or Strategic? (1 of 4)

Many software suppliers seem to be talking about how they do capacity management these days.  
In the server area of infrastructure management alone you have:

·        Established businesses that have been offering data capture, capacity database and a    range of capacity reporting for some time.   Typically these businesses have started in one technology area such as mainframe or Unix and spread their coverage across platforms as IT has evolved.

·        Point solutions that analyse current performance and make tuning recommendations

·        Framework providers touting capacity management as one of the modules within their toolset.  Often this is the result of acquisition of a third party capacity management product that then gets increasingly integrated with their framework

·        SaaS/Cloud solutions that take in data from one or many environments

In this blog, I’d like to consider the first two of these options.

Common with environments that support rapid provisioning, is confusion between the first and second areas.  Both groups talk of capacity management, but the focus of what capacity is being managed is different.  This is not the metrics or applications that are being watched, more the time frame and nature of capacity events that are being reviewed.

In days gone past, one might have talked of this as the difference between capacity management and performance management.  As everyone seems to be using the terminology much more interchangeably these days, perhaps it is better expressed as strategic capacity management and operational capacity management.

Operational capacity management is based on measured performance metrics and recommends operational changes, e.g. moving VMs.

Strategic capacity management is based on taking action well in advance to remove the risks and problems before they occur.

I’ll be taking a look at both of these types of capacity management on Friday, in the meantime why not sign up to our Community and access our range of capacity management white papers and webinars http://www.metron-athene.com/_resources/index.html

Andrew Smith

Chief Executive Officer

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