Manage & Plan Capacity for the Internal Cloud

You cannot afford to assume that the data center has unlimited capacity; this is even more true for the internal cloud.

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Your Challenge

Balancing maximum agility with limited resources. Internal infrastructure can be like an external cloud (Amazon) in some ways but not in others. The external cloud is open ended – a third party provider maintains a practically unlimited pool of on-demand capacity. In the private cloud, capacity is limited and the business owns and manages all the capacity whether it is being used or not.
Showing the cost of a “server” in a cloud. Server and storage consolidation breaks a neat 1-to-1 connection that has existed between solution delivery and the acquisition/deployment of physical IT assets. Provisioning an app or service in a consolidated environment is less about acquiring and deploying technology than it is carving resources out of an existing pool of capacity.
Showing value for investment and justifying further acquisition. The challenge of accounting for the costs and guaranteeing service for physical and virtual entities in a consolidated infrastructure is more complex. Also, if that 1-to-1 relationship is broken, how do we know when more physical capacity needs to be acquired?

Our Advice

Critical Insight

Server virtualization is a great tactical enabler for consolidation, but virtualization does not create capacity. Beneath the consolidation-enabling abstraction layer of virtualization, the enterprise owns and maintains the consolidated physical IT infrastructure.
To get the most efficient and effective use out of total capacity you must draw a clear line from business needs through software and hardware needs. In capacity management and planning, one size does not fit all, what is “good enough” varies.
Enterprises that carry out capacity management and tier services to more efficiently meet variable demands have a higher degree of success in their overall consolidation and virtualization projects.

Impact and Result

Efficient and effective management of the developing internal cloud begins here with:

Development of a tiered capacity model that organizes assets into gold, silver, and bronze service tiers (or resource pools).
Accounting of the total cost of capacity for each tier based on the total cost for each layer of server, network, storage, management, and facilities.
Establishing a capacity plan that tracks current capacity usage and forecasts expected growth in order to plan longer term capacity growth.

Get to Action

Turn infrastructure management outside-in
Work from business needs through application requirements to total capacity requirements.
- Storyboard: Manage & Plan Capacity for the Internal Cloud
- Managing Capacity in a Consolidated Infrastructure
Assess current infrastructure to establish a baseline for planning
Map current dependencies from application to infrastructure and group by criticality.
- Capacity Planning Data Collection & Tiering Workbook
Develop capacity plans
Create service tiers and a reserve capacity model for future capacity.
- Capacity Management Process Checklist
Obtain executive buy-in for a capacity management business plan
Demonstrate how ongoing capacity assessment and planning will help deliver service goals at the lowest possible cost.
- Internal Cloud Business Plan Template
Make efficient use of capacity, and plan for hardware upgrades
Use an assessment checklist to gather the requirements of new and updated applications.
- Application Assessment Checklist

Avoid Server Virtualization Implementation Pain

Virtualization is not a magic bullet. Poor scoping of infrastructure and business needs will lead to implementation pain.

Leverage Server Virtualization for DR Affordability and Agility

Virtualization is not just for consolidation - drive cost and complexity out of system availability and restore.

Build an Optimized Infrastructure-as-a-Service Internal Cloud

The best computing cloud is the one you've already started with server virtualization.

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