What is Capacity Planning?

Capacity planning is a method of identifying how much resource is required to meet service demands now, as well as in the future. In supporting capacity planning and performance monitoring, IT organizations are really evaluating the service levels they provide, which are decided by customer expectations. This discipline is of huge advantage to IT Managers and Business Firms in their respective areas.

IT Managers

• Business unit managers will receive capacity status as well as application performance report in business terms


• Helps in providing the management objective proof of the infrastructure upgrades which are required
  
• Saves energy consumption by virtualizing and consolidating servers
  
• Helps move to latest technology with confidence and efficiency
  
• Helps meet Service Level Agreements (SLA) without the wastage of money or consumption of space associated with over-provisioning
  
• Fixes performance issues and ends firefighting
  
• Helps face IT problems before they become bigger

Business Firms

• Efficient processes, better utilization of capacity as well as better control over costs helps in decreasing costs
  
• The revenue of the company sees an increase due to better productivity, greater responsiveness to market dynamics, higher return on existing investment in IT, decreased downtime, improved response time as well as maximum appication availability

Capacity planning, hence, also has a huge impact in supporting the business alignment with IT in the following ways:

• Showing the business needs for infrastructure upgrades


• Helping in saving energy through optimization of requirement of power


• IT service management within the business


• Minimizing costs and maximizing productivity through optimal purchasing decisions


• In disaster recovery plans, capacity planning helps in handling workloads after a catastrophe at data centers