Capacity planning
Don't settle for best guesses. Base your capacity planning on IT Analytics' modelling and forecasting
Today's tough economic climate has made the need for accurate, business-aligned capacity planning increasingly important. With many IT organisations facing a reduced budget over the coming years, inefficiencies in services from under-utilised, misconfigured or inadequately supplied infrastructure are an unnecessary burden to carry. To succeed, a careful equilibrium of IT supply to business demand needs to be identified, understood and maintained. For that to happen, you need the precise facts to guide you.
Insight to make smarter, more informed decisions
Our unique IT Analytics approach to capacity planning delivers the facts to make the most appropriate, informed decisions for your estate - reducing risk and controlling costs. Unlike traditional approaches that only provide simplified infrastructure utilisation and forecast out from these, IT Analytics partners data-driven modelling with expert, tailored interpretation on your capacity planning position direct from our analysts.
How IT Analytics delivers advanced capacity planning
By using an advanced top-down approach that correlates business transactions, demand and behaviour to IT estate utilisation, Sumerian is helping a growing number of enterprise organisations make smarter decisions around their capacity planning.
Creates a "joined up" view
By capturing and combining data from across the IT estate and mapping it to key business processes and transactions, IT Analytics provides a "joined up " model of the current working environment exposing hidden correlations that indicate where changes, on both the IT and business side of the equation, will bring about the most returns from a performance, capacity and cost perspective.
Establishes an accurate baseline
Using our IT Analytics techniques, Sumerian creates a baseline of the IT estate, establishing the current end-to-end performance and capacity of each service within your organisation’s IT portfolio. This is achieved by taking a service-by-service modelling approach, capturing samples of performance and utilisation data from your service’s underlying system components, such as server CPU, physical and virtual memory, I/O, network latency and disk storage used. This baseline is then tracked over time to ascertain the service’s utilisation by hour, day, week, and month – capturing average as well as peak usage or busy hour (highest demand), along with any seasonality trends.
Enables an understanding of service behaviour
Using these baseline models, the effects of business load on IT service utilisation are then data mined and analysed. In particular, we examine the correlation between the processing of a business transaction and the way IT system components interact with it and one another. For example, by applying correlation and linear regression analysis to the baselines, Sumerian can extrapolate how memory or CPU utilisation are impacted by business volumes, or how database transactions are consuming disk storage.
Accurately calculates current headroom
Sumerian then calculates the currently available headroom in terms of business transactions, and ascertains if capacity has, or is at risk of, breaching saturation limits. To enable visibility and clear understanding of headroom, Sumerian uses graphical load map visualisations to help both IT teams and the business units understand their services’ current capacity utilisation and headroom. If any areas are breaching limits, the correlations formed between infrastructure, application and business layers will determine what impact this is currently having on business demand and application performance.
Powerful scenario modelling and forecasting
From understanding current capacity and headroom, sophisticated scenario modelling techniques can then be applied to gain an even deeper level of strategic intelligence for forecasting growth requirements or making predictions around the impact of architectural changes and upgrades. The advantage of scenario modelling is that it can safely answer any number of "what if?" questions around capacity – essentially providing a "pre-sandbox" environment in which to test out ideas before they’re green-lighted in reality.
Keeps pace with your changing environment
The continual monitoring of service utilisation and business demand is vitally important if capacity is to be successfully managed on an ongoing basis. Business behaviour and demand will fluctuate over time, and even with the most precise forecasts to hand, there will be unforeseen changes that can’t be predicted. Therefore, keeping a running view of each service’s performance and capacity against demand is critical. Sumerian’s ongoing data capture of these key metrics enables the capacity planning position to be constantly tracked, highlighting trends and indicating where changes will bring about the most business benefit.
More information
Download the Solution Overview – Capacity Planning Analytics
This overview outlines the key benefits and features of Capacity Planning Analytics.
Download our white paper – Achieving business-aligned capacity planning with IT Analytics.
With many of today's IT organisations facing budgetary constraints, this new white paper examines the need for improved, joined up capacity planning, and outlines the specific advantages of IT Analytics' progressive business-aligned techniques.
Read the case study - Capacity planning
Sumerian improves capacity planning and risk management for trading arm of large UK bank.