For Vendor Strategy Professionals

Vendors Beware: Virtualization, PaaS, And SaaS Are Changing The Capacity Management Tools Market

by Jean-Pierre Garbani, November 10, 2009

Continuous improvement in the server technology performance-price ratio has caused many organizations to simply dismiss the need for accurate workload and resource planning efforts. In the current economic climate, infrastructure optimization and operational . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Virtualization Is This Season's Cap Management

Capacity Management In A Virtual World

by Simon Yates, June 17, 2009

With improved service performance, coupled with the rise of virtualization and the limits of hardware sprawl, Forrester anticipates improvements to the capacity management process. Data centers will make a comeback. They'll be different though, and better, . . .

For Vendor Strategy Professionals

Capacity Management In A Virtual World

Transforming The Traditional Process To Serve Virtualization Imperatives

by Jean-Pierre Garbani, April 17, 2009

Traditional capacity planning is seen as an exercise in forecasting the alignment of hardware resources to enterprise activity growth. Cheap systems meant that this was eventually considered to have little value: Why use scarce and expensive intellectual . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Capacity Manager - Job Profile And Description  (28 KB XLS)

by Evelyn Hubbert, March 26, 2009

Position overview: This person is tasked with bringing a holistic and accurate IT capacity plan for infrastructure needs to their company.

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Role Overview: Capacity Manager

A Balancing Act Of Today's And Tomorrow's Needs

by Evelyn Hubbert, December 1, 2008

Capacity management is a process aimed at controlling the IT infrastructure in such a way that resource shortages are anticipated and corrected before they occur, thus maintaining service-level agreements (SLAs) contracted with the business users. For . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Retrofitting Your Data Center For Better Capacity

by Galen Schreck, James Staten, October 29, 2008

Data centers are expected to last 25 to 30 years, but you need to periodically refresh your environmental gear for better capacity. Many companies can't deploy modern server equipment like blades that consolidate more wattage within single racks. But . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Don't Build Your Next Data Center, Colocate It

Colocation Will Give You More Power, Space, And Resiliency For Less Money

by Galen Schreck, October 21, 2008

If you've consolidated as much IT infrastructure as you can and your data center is still running out of space and power, you may be thinking about building a new data center. Before you begin, ask yourself this question: If you needed more office space, . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Five Key Storage Strategies For A Down Economy

Tips To Make The Most Of A Tight Budget In The Face Of Ongoing Data Growth

by Andrew Reichman, July 16, 2008

It's clear that the economy is on a downward trajectory, and regardless of the duration or severity, there's no doubt that belt-tightening in IT spending will be the norm for the next year. At the same time, most IT budgets were already stagnant or slow-growing . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Topic Overview: IT Consolidation

Rationalizing Data Center Infrastructure Investments For Greatest Efficiency

by James Staten, April 14, 2008

The majority of IT infrastructure and operations professionals today are rationalizing IT to some degree. This leads to IT consolidation projects for most large organizations, as the finite resources must do more and as nearly everyone faces space, power, . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

Topic Overview: IT Management Software

by Natalie Lambert, November 13, 2007

Today's organizations are trying to keep up with the continuous pace of technology change and growing business requirements. The importance of management technologies to monitor and manage the wide array of hardware and software systems deployed in the . . .

For Infrastructure & Operations Professionals

The App Tier Is Tapped Out Again?!

Dealing With The Server Demands Of Large Middle-Tier Applications

by James Staten, July 17, 2007

As the static Web rapidly evolves into a fully interactive Internet, the data center performance burden shifts from the Web tier to the application tier. This shift puts new demands and challenges on server administrators — if properly addressed, they . . .

For Technology Product Management & Marketing Professionals

The Capacity Planning Software Market

Sustaining Application Performances

by Evelyn Hubbert, Jean-Pierre Garbani, June 15, 2007

For a long time, capacity planning has been directly linked to the scarcity and cost of resources. In the mainframe era, it was considered a necessity. In the distributed system world, it faded when hardware resources became seemingly abundant and cheap. . . .

When Calculating Terabytes Per FTE, Consider The Big Picture, Not Absolute Benchmarks

by Andrew Reichman, November 3, 2006

Storage managers spend a lot of time thinking about the storage volume managed per employee, often measured as terabytes per full-time employee (TB/FTE), as a metric of storage management efficiency. Variability in measurement methodology and environment-specific . . .

Firms Still Struggle To Predict Capacity Utilization Accurately

by Laura Koetzle, May 17, 2006

Recently, Forrester surveyed 48 IT decision-makers at enterprises about their server capacity utilization experiences. Although 83% of respondents measure utilization for their distributed systems with popular tools from vendors like BMC Software, SAS, . . .

Service-Oriented Capacity Planning

by Jean-Pierre Garbani, December 10, 2004

Capacity planning is a perfectly mastered discipline at the infrastructure component level that has not yet followed the general trend toward managing IT as a service. This is due in part to the failure of many IT organizations to recognize its value . . .

Capacity Matters

Plan Ahead For Terabyte Data Growth

by Bob Zimmerman, July 12, 2004

Planning ahead for surging capacity should involve more than simply ordering disk drives and paying for additional software licenses. Within the IT group, relatively large increases in data may radically affect data handling and operational processes, . . .

Is Capacity Planning Obsolete? Grid Computing Not the Complete Answer

by Jean-Pierre Garbani, May 6, 2003

Not all applications can scale gracefully to multiple servers or multiple processors. This alone should maintain capacity planners in business for some time.

Performance Management and Capacity Planning Are Two Sides of the Same Coin

by Jean-Pierre Garbani, January 29, 2003

If capacity planning delivers an infrastructure capacity that satisfies the performance requirements, then performance management is a precaution against errors, application problems or an unforeseen evolution of the application usage.

Best Practices in Capacity Planning for the New Application Environment

by Jean-Pierre Garbani, Colin Rankine, December 17, 2002

The rules have changed, the application profile is radically different, but the business value and core requirement for capacity planning expertise persists.

Standard Benchmarks for Capacity Planning: Unsafe at Any Speed

by Jean-Pierre Garbani, December 17, 2002

The use of benchmarks in capacity planning is valid only if the actual application is run in a load testing comparison between two systems. A potential approach is to "profile" the application usage of system resources.

Strategies to Improve Storage Capacity Management

by Anders Lofgren, September 13, 2002

Data life-cycle management is a long-term strategic initiative that most customers have not addressed to date. However, given current storage growth rates, customers should address this area in the next 12 to 18 months.

Capacity Planning and Performance Management Organizational Considerations

by Gene Leganza, August 12, 2002

For midsize and larger IT shops, the key issue is the separation of the operationally oriented performance management role from the strategic capacity planning role — not separating the roles will mean the capacity planning role will not be performed . . .

Key Metrics for Capacity Planning

by Jean-Pierre Garbani, August 6, 2002

Fundamental metrics are a global gauge of how much capacity is currently used by a given application or a set of applications. Secondary metrics are used to characterize how the resources of a specific component are used by an application.

Capacity Planning Tools for Servers

by Jean-Pierre Garbani, July 8, 2002

While there are several competent products, their efficiency is directly tied to the skill of the users, and Giga's recommendation is to first find or train the team, and then let them go shopping for a product they think they can use effectively.

Common Mistakes in Mainframe Capacity Planning

by David Mastrobattista, June 19, 2002

Common mistakes in mainframe capacity planning can lead to erroneous capacity planning assumptions that all too often require additional computing resources and/or additional software license expenses beyond those originally planned.