Capacity Planning

The goal of capacity planning is to identify the right amount of resources required to meet service demands now and in the future. It is a proactive discipline with far-reaching impact, supporting:

• IT and business alignment, helping to show the cost and business need for infrastructure upgrades;
• Consolidation and virtualization strategies, ensuring that consolidated real and virtual system configurations will meet service levels,
• Green initiatives, facilitating the optimization of power requirements;
• ITIL processes, because capacity planning is one the hallmarks of mature IT management processes;
• Purchasing decisions, minimizing costs needed to maximize productivity;
• Application development, predicting the impact on production systems of new or modified applications;
• Disaster recovery plans, determining the optimal way to handle workloads after a catastrophe at one of your data centers;
• And more...

The benefits are pervasive, and the effects are game-changing. IT organizations become more productive, spending less time fighting fires and more time proactively thwarting performance issues before users are impacted. A more agile IT emerges from understanding current and future resource needs. Budgeting is more disciplined and costs are controlled. The IT organization exhibits value and a competitive edge recognized - and appreciated - by the business.

Capacity Planning...Who Benefits?

Business

• Increase revenue through maximum availability, decreased downtime, improved response times, greater productivity, greater responsiveness to market dynamics, greater return on existing IT investment
• Decrease costs through higher capacity utilization, more efficient processes, just-in-time upgrades, greater cost control

CIOs

• Control infrastructure costs and stay within budget
• Make informed decisions by understanding cost vs benefit tradeoffs for various configuration options
• Negotiate service levels with business units knowing the resources required to meet them
• Provide input to business decisions regarding costs of supporting various services
• Make informed purchasing decisions based on business impact
• Support business unit goals with minimum risk
• Objectively double check the recommendations of your vendors

IT Managers

• Meet all SLAs without over-provisioning (which wastes money and consumes limited space)
• Report performance and capacity status to business unit managers in business terms
• Migrate to newer technology efficiently and with confidence
• Consolidate and virtualize servers to save on costs, space and energy consumption
• Provide objective proof to your management regarding the business need for infrastructure upgrades

Capacity Planning from TeamQuest Corporation

Forrester Research, Inc. recognizes TeamQuest as a tier-one provider of capacity planning software. Our specialization in Capacity Management software allows an unrelenting focus on advancing capacity planning techniques and capabilities, simplifying for users a sophisticated, important discipline.

The latest release of TeamQuest software offers exciting advances in capacity planning, including smoother, slicker cross-platform modeling, more intricate modeling of multithreaded platforms, and much more.

Read more on capacity planning techniques