Six Critical Steps to Evolving Capacity Management
Demands around your data center are changing fast. Now, find out the six critical steps to evolving capacity management!
August 29, 2014
Your data center is growing. You have more applications, workloads and users accessing critical resources. Business demands continuously place new strains on data center resources, capacity and efficiency.
So, is this going to change anytime soon?
The reality around the modern data center is that it is the central hub for all major technologies and delivery platforms. Organizations are asking their data centers for greater density and lower-cost operation. As the data center continues to grow, how can an administrator continue to cram more users and resources into an already tight space? This is where managing capacity becomes a critical operational initiative.
Effective capacity management has become a critical differentiator for IT organizations. Those that can’t effectively evolve their capacity management practice will continue to struggle with complexity and negligible insights into capacity sizing and the impact of changing demand and resulting service/application performance. However, those that gain advanced capacity management capabilities will be able to more effectively right-size investments, support key IT projects, and align resources with business objectives.
In this white paper from CA, we examine a practical look at capacity management, while outlining the six key steps IT organizations can take to realize capacity management that delivers maximum value.
For most IT executives, there is a fundamental, common reality: The demands are high while budget and manpower are flat or declining. Within this context, capacity management—the process of aligning IT resources with current and emerging demands—is increasingly growing in importance. Capacity management is a key means with which IT teams can address their core operational objectives:
Maximizing resource utilization in order to reduce investments and costs
Addressing the increasingly pressing demand to support business agility
Performing strategic IT infrastructure planning that guarantees capacity will be available when needed while providing acceptable service/application performance levels
Enhancing budgeting accuracy and intelligence in order to more effectively manage expenses and new investments
Strengthening service level agreement (SLA) definition and compliance to meet or exceed availability, performance and response time requirements
Improving visibility and transparency in terms of how business users are consuming IT resources
Without comprehensive, effective capacity management, IT organizations are flying blind, which means IT teams have to resort to being reactive rather than proactive. Not only does this make it difficult to manage current infrastructure and capacity demands, but it also significantly hinders the organization’s ability to support emerging requirements and initiatives.
To help address these capacity challenges – both long and short term – CA outlines six key steps that will help organizations advance their capacity management objectives.
Step 1: Establish a unified view of component capacity management data
Step 2: Establish application/service capacity management capabilities
Step 3: Leverage scenario planning capabilities
Step 4: Leverage business data
Step 5: Leverage data from across the technology market
Step 6: Implement continuous optimization and improvement
Capacity management is a critical endeavor and it’s only going to continue to grow in the months and years ahead. Fundamentally, organizations need to get more out of their IT investments and services, and capacity management is the way to make that happen.
Download this whitepaper today to learn how with the six steps outlined in this paper, IT organizations can begin to establish the comprehensive, intelligent capacity management capabilities they need to more effectively address their operational and strategic objectives.
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