Capacity Management: Operational or Strategic? (3 of 4)

In my previous blog in this series I outlined how valuable operational capacity tools are at addressing what are essentially performance concerns related to capacity, for example, how many more VMs can my Host support?  

Such products do not provide a complete picture.  If this is your only capacity management work, it risks missing broader and longer term capacity issues which when addressed  will also have direct financial benefit to your business.

The other day I read an article comparing capacity management to walking with a stone in your shoe.  Operational capacity management is taking the stone out of your shoe either when it has started to hurt you, or when you first feel it is there but before it has caused you any real pain.Much better practice is to fasten the shoe so well that the stone never gets in there in the first place.  

This is strategic capacity management – taking action well in advance to remove the risk that the problem ever occurs.  

No matter how well you tie the shoe, you won’t be able to keep every piece of grit out but you will prevent the larger and nastier stones from getting in there and surprising you.

Not all events we need to plan for can be based on what is happening on the system at the moment.  Just capturing current performance metrics and basing capacity decisions on them is not enough.  We might assess how many more VMs a host can support based on past measurements but in the case of a change to our web site this may change the profile of how users interact with our systems. Capacity could be consumed in ways in which past resource profiles no longer serve as a guide. 

Another example is merger and acquisition, here you need measurement of performance and this can involve bringing together metrics from many disparate systems, across what have up to that point been separate businesses.

What you need then is something that lets you predict capacity based on something other than past performance.  Strategic capacity management needs that past performance data when it is relevant – often much can be learned from past trends in system usage.  

Extrapolating forward can tell us something about how busy our systems will be in the future.  Bringing in business level inputs means that more than trends and extrapolation is required, for example the capability to introduce step change to trends or analytically model how service levels will change over time.

Strategic capacity management tools like Metron’s athene® provide this greater breadth of planning functionality.  This supplements day to day performance orientated operational capacity management activity using point solutions.  

http://www.metron-athene.com/products/athene/datacapture.html

One phrase – capacity management, but two differing definitions and deliverables.

On Thursday I'll summarize what I have been saying about operational and strategic capacity management.

Andrew Smith

Chief Executive Officer