Use this deep dive into IT capacity management to ensure that you appropriately provision IT resources to meet your current and future business demands.
IT capacity management is a business process that ensures IT resources are sufficient to meet future needs. IT capacity managers must understand current and future business needs. They will map IT resources to meet these requirements.
According to Adam Grummitt, author of Capacity Management: A Practitioner Guide, “The role of capacity management is to answer a variety of ‘what if’ questions, to evaluate alternatives and tradeoffs, to compare options, and to justify strategic and tactical decisions during all phases of the application and information lifecycle.”
IT capacity management is complex. The three subprocesses of IT capacity management include component capacity management, service capacity management, and business capacity management. Each subprocess reviews different elements that impact overall IT capacity management.
“Capacity management allows us to optimize a major component of enterprise spending (IT capacity) against enterprise requirements,” says Jonathan Gladstone, an IT Systems Planner at BMO Financial Group, and a part-time professor at Georgian College in Barrie, Ontario. “I often tell my students that we seek a balance between consolidation and virtualization on the one hand (minimizing the physical resources required to satisfy a given level of potential demand) against redundancy on the other (expanding the physical resource base to allow for fault-masking and scalability).”
The IT capacity manager ensures the organization has ample IT capacity to meet business needs. They drive the capacity management process. Monitoring, analyzing, planning, and advising are all part of their role.
Gladstone shares the essentials of his work in IT capacity management. “I’ve been working as a capacity planner for about 20 years, mostly in mainframe systems. I extract, summarize, and analyze performance data regularly, with an eye to current performance improvement, current and future cost management, demand forecasting, and capacity proposals for future years. I also spend a lot of time on systems resource configuration for optimizing our normal day-to-day capacity and failover capability.”
The person or team responsible for IT capacity management varies by organization. “Latent Effects of Cloud Computing on IT Capacity Management Structures,” a research study by Joe Bauer and Al Bellamy, references various titles for those responsible for the IT capacity management process. These include the following:
The research study found that cloud computing has changed the face of IT capacity management. “It seemed that on one side was a sort of classic IT capacity management structure, which emerged from the old mainframe days when computers were extremely expensive. Then, on the other side was a more emerging cloud IT capacity-management structure, where capacity is seen as virtually unlimited.”
The shift away from classic IT capacity management, where a dedicated capacity manager or team manages hardware and other IT resources, is a result of cloud computing, virtualization, and automation availability. The researchers suggest that “the financial cost ratio and shift in what resources are managed delineate the far ends of the spectrum of IT capacity-management structures, but they also contain an undercurrent of deterministic progression, where the increasing adoption of cloud computing leads to the inevitable demise of the classic IT capacity management profession as a role.”
Below is a comparison between traditional IT capacity manager responsibilities and today’s cloud IT capacity manager. The major shift involves the financials of cloud capacity management.
| Traditional IT Capacity Manager | Cloud Computing IT Capacity Manager |
|---|---|
| Understand current and future demand | Understand current and future demand |
| Design, procure, and deploy IT stack | Add capacity to cloud services |
| Add servers, switches, and racks | Configure auto-scaling |
| Manage and monitor physical hardware | Manage application purchase |
| Manage and monitor applications | Finance/accounting responsibility |
| Manage data center | Cloud contracts |
| Project management | Capacity planning |
| Capacity planning | Project management |
| Monitor performance KPIs | Monitor performance KPIs |
| Capacity optimization | Capacity optimization |
| Recommend improvements | Recommend improvements |
IT capacity planning details current and future IT capacity needs. Though teams often use IT capacity management and planning interchangeably, IT capacity planning is the intake of upfront capacity requirements. This data is an input to the IT capacity management lifecycle.
The IT capacity plan defines the resources necessary to meet the organization’s service requirements. Without capacity planning, organizations face performance problems, unnecessary hardware expenditures, and user dissatisfaction.
Download IT Capacity Management Planning Template
This IT capacity planning template evaluates all IT services and their capacity requirements. Use the template to anticipate future growth with a response plan as you reach your capacity threshold.
For more capacity planning templates, visit our capacity planning templates collection.
IT capacity planning is part of the capacity management process. The IT capacity planning process provides insight into business needs, existing capacity, gaps, and financial strain, and offers an impact assessment.
IT capacity planning informs decisions that affect the budget. It is essential to remove the guesswork from IT decisions. Guessing at future capacity needs and excess procurement leads to unnecessary financial strain. Data-driven capacity planning eliminates surprises.
“Good business capacity planning practices can also help you avoid spending money,” writes Larry Klosterboer in his book, ITIL Capacity Management. “Most organizations that don’t perform capacity planning use 15 percent or less of their IT infrastructure capacity. When you begin to manage capacity more carefully, you can drive that utilization up to 45 percent or more, getting three times more work done with the same amount of infrastructure. This represents a substantial potential saving for capacity management in general.”
Each organization approaches IT capacity planning differently. Below is an example from an e-learning coalition, Europe Latin-American New Education (E-LANE). The study aims to ensure the success of IT-dependent projects, specifically e-learning.
E-LANE is a consortium that focuses on reducing the digital divide in Latin American countries by developing an education program that uses advanced teaching methodologies and paradigms, along with open-source telecommunications and information technologies. In the research paper, “Prerequisites and Development Strategy for Sustainable E-Learning Projects,” the team shares an example of IT capacity management:
“Table 4 shows how many times the normal load can be supported as a function of the number of deployed servers, with only 5 percent of server saturation probability. This table describes the capacity planning for the Regional Institute of Public Administration in Nuevo Leon, Mexico. This model was developed by determining that a response delay by the server of over 3 seconds was unacceptable and determining with such a limit, based on normal load samples of installed LMS environments, how many requests could be served concurrently.”
Capacity planning is part of the overall capacity management process. You plan for current and future capacity, then manage according to that blueprint. Capacity management is an ongoing lifecycle that includes monitoring, data collection and analysis, and optimization.
Over time, you will establish a set of IT capacity management strategies and best practices. Using process automation tools may impact your approach. However, one thing is certain: Capacity planning, monitoring, and change will become habitual.
Below are IT capacity management best practice suggestions from industry experts:
A high-quality source for IT capacity management education and best practices is the Computer Measurement Group (CMG), Inc. With more than 45 years in the books, CMG is an organization founded on sharing information and education about mainframe best practices. It is a leading provider of robust training, events, and content on capacity planning and capacity management.
Email and the internet are a couple of IT services that benefit from IT capacity management. Capacity managers must allot resources based on forecasts to maintain uptime. They must also consider the terms of service-level agreements (SLA).
With the increase in cloud options to run, develop, store, and manage critical applications and data, as well as the large number of companies migrating to the cloud, it’s no wonder many organizations have rolled back cloud migrations due to performance.
As noted in the State of Hybrid Cloud and Migration: February 2021 report, “Cloud migration is, more often than not, treated as a one-way street where organizations migrate applications and workloads from on-premises to a public cloud or, less often, from one public cloud to another. A whopping 72 percent of participating organizations stated that they’ve had to move applications back on-premises after migrating them to the public cloud. Such repatriation doesn’t necessarily mean there’s an issue,” shares Randy Randhawa, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Virtana.
He continues, “Still, cloud migrations require a lot of time and effort, neither of which most IT groups have a lot of. When you have more than just a handful of cases doing this — and three-quarters of respondents is a significant number — it raises some eyebrows. It’s important to distinguish between strategic repatriation undertaken to support evolving business needs and a rollback to undo challenges that are caused by inadequate migration planning. It turns out that there’s not just one thing driving disruptive (i.e., not strategic and purposeful) repatriation.”
Also in the report, respondents cited several issues, including:
Additionally, one-third of the respondents cited two or more reasons for their cloud rollback, and 12 percent pointed to three or more issues.
In the above example, IT capacity management’s process of understanding utilization and performance characteristics of workloads in the data centers helps a company decide to migrate or stay. Randhawa continues, “Not every workload should be migrated to a public cloud, which is why many organizations opt for a hybrid cloud approach, keeping some part of their estate on-premises. You need to consider various attributes of different workloads — e.g., data, back end, privacy and security requirements — and their inherent suitability for a public cloud environment.”
Several frameworks and models can guide business operation improvement. ASL, CMMI, ITIL, and MOF are frameworks that include IT capacity in their standards.
IT capacity management tools help companies simulate IT demand. These solutions aid in forecasting future IT resource requirements. They identify constraints and areas where resources are out of balance with demand or not fully utilized.
According to Elisabeth Stahl, Director and Distinguished Engineer at IBM, “You can essentially do capacity planning on a cocktail napkin — or a simple spreadsheet. There are also many sophisticated tools, so choose what works best for you and your organization. And have a laser-like focus on optimization, that's the key.”
Each organization will manage IT infrastructure capacity differently. Some will implement a sophisticated and automated solution, while others will rely on a spreadsheet. An accomplished senior enterprise IT architect in the healthcare industry shares details about tools that help with capacity planning vs. capacity management. “Tools that use performance load analysis and queue network modeling are the ideal for capacity planning. Tools that measure utilization, throughput, trending, and expected saturation are the target for capacity management operational monitoring.”
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