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Develop an Availability and Capacity Management Plan
Manage capacity to increase uptime and reduce costs.
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Contributors
- Adrian Blant, Network and Capacity Authority, Vodafone
- Brett Johnstone, Capacity Manager Cloud Services DCSG, Datacom
- James Zhang, Senior Manager Disaster Recovery, AIG Technology
- Mayank Banerjee, CTO, Global Supply Chain Management, HelloFresh
- Mike Lynch, Capacity Manager, Telefónica
- Paul Waguespack, Manager of Application Systems Engineering, Tufts Health Plan
- Richie Mendoza, IT Consultant, SMITS Inc.
- Rob Thompson, President, IT Tools & Process
- Todd Evans, Capacity and Performance Management SME, IBM
Your Challenge
- It is crucial for capacity managers to provide capacity in advance of need to maximize availability.
- In an effort to ensure maximum uptime, organizations are overprovisioning (an average of 59% for compute, and 48% for storage). With budget pressure mounting (especially on the capital side), the cost of this approach can’t be ignored.
- Half of organizations have experienced capacity-related downtime, and almost 60% wait more than three months for additional capacity.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- All too often capacity management is left as an afterthought. The best capacity managers bake capacity management into their organization’s business processes, becoming drivers of value.
- Communication is key. Build bridges between your organization’s silos, and involve business stakeholders in a dialog about capacity requirements.
Impact and Result
- Map business metrics to infrastructure component usage, and use your organization’s own data to forecast demand.
- Project future needs in line with your hardware lifecycle. Never suffer availability issues as a result of a lack of capacity again.
- Establish infrastructure as a driver of business value, not a “black hole” cost center.
Start here – read the Executive Brief
Read our concise Executive Brief to find out why you should build a capacity management plan, review Info-Tech’s methodology, and understand the four ways we can support you in completing this project.
1. Conduct a business impact analysis
Determine the most critical business services to ensure availability.
2. Establish visibility into core systems
Craft a monitoring strategy to gather usage data.
3. Solicit and incorporate business needs
Integrate business stakeholders into the capacity management process.
4. Identify and mitigate risks
Identify and mitigate risks to your capacity and availability.
Guided Implementations
This guided implementation is a six call advisory process.
Guided Implementation #1 - Conduct a business impact analysis
Call #1 - Conduct a business impact analysis.
Guided Implementation #2 - Establish visibility into core systems
Call #1 - Discuss your monitoring strategy.
Guided Implementation #3 - Solicit and incorporate business needs
Call #1 - Develop a plan to gather historical data; set up plan to solicit business needs
Call #2 - Evaluate data sources
Guided Implementation #4 - Identify and mitigate risks
Call #1 - Discuss possible risks and strategies for risk mitigation
Call #2 - Review your capacity management plan
Book Your Workshop
Onsite workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost onsite delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
Module 1: Conduct a Business Impact Analysis
The Purpose
- Determine the most important IT services for the business.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Understand which services to prioritize for ensuring availability.
Activities
Outputs
Create a scale to measure different levels of impact.
- RTOs/RPOs
Evaluate each service by its potential impact.
- List of gold systems
Assign a criticality rating based on the costs of downtime.
- Criticality matrix
Module 2: Establish Visibility Into Core Systems
The Purpose
- Monitor and measure usage metrics of key systems.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Capture and correlate data on business activity with infrastructure capacity usage.
Activities
Outputs
Define your monitoring strategy.
- RACI chart
Implement your monitoring tool/aggregator.
- Capacity/availability monitoring strategy
Module 3: Develop a Plan to Project Future Needs
The Purpose
- Determine how to project future capacity usage needs for your organization.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Data-based, systematic projection of future capacity usage needs.
Activities
Outputs
Analyze historical usage trends.
- Plan for soliciting future needs
Interface with the business to determine needs.
Develop a plan to combine these two sources of truth.
- Future needs
Module 4: Identify and Mitigate Risks
The Purpose
Identify potential risks to capacity and availability.- Develop strategies to ameliorate potential risks.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Proactive approach to capacity that addresses potential risks before they impact availability.
Activities
Outputs
Identify capacity and availability risks.
- List of risks
Determine strategies to address risks.
- List of strategies to address risks
Populate and review completed capacity plan.
- Completed capacity plan
