Capacity management
Information technology resources are sufficient to meet business requirements effectively / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Capacity management's goal is to ensure that information technology resources are sufficient to meet upcoming business requirements cost-effectively. One common interpretation of capacity management is described in the ITIL framework. ITIL version 3 views capacity management as comprising three sub-processes: business capacity management, service capacity management, and component capacity management.
This article needs additional citations for verification. (June 2013) |
As the usage of IT services change and functionality evolves, the amount of central processing units (CPUs), memory and storage to a physical or virtual server etc. also changes. If there are spikes in, for example, processing power at a particular time of the day, it proposes analyzing what is happening at that time and making changes to maximize the existing IT infrastructure; for example, tuning the application, or moving a batch cycle to a quieter period. This capacity planning identifies any potential capacity related issues likely to arise, and justifies any necessary investment decisions - for example, the server requirements to accommodate future IT resource demand, or a data center consolidation.[1]
These activities are intended to optimize performance and efficiency, and to plan for and justify financial investments. Capacity management is concerned with:
- Monitoring the performance and throughput or load on a server, server farm, or property
- Performance analysis of measurement data, including analysis of the impact of new releases on capacity
- Performance tuning of activities to ensure the most efficient use of existing infrastructure
- Understanding the demands on the service and future plans for workload growth (or shrinkage)
- Influences on demand for computing resources
- Capacity planning of storage, computer hardware, software and connection infrastructure resources required over some future period of time.[2]
Capacity management interacts with the discipline of Performance Engineering, both during the requirements and design activities of building a system, and when using performance monitoring.