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Manage & Plan Capacity for the Internal Cloud
Info-Tech Research Group, Feb 2011
You cannot afford to assume that the data center has unlimited capacity; this is even more true for the internal cloud.
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
1. Turn infrastructure management outside-in
Work from business needs through application requirements to total capacity requirements.
- Storyboard: Manage & Plan Capacity for the Internal Cloud (powerpoint)
- Managing Capacity in a Consolidated Infrastructure (video)
2. 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 (excel)
3. Develop capacity plans
Create service tiers and a reserve capacity model for future capacity.
- Capacity Management Process Checklist (word)
4. 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 (word)
5. 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 (word)
*This is a report bundle with multiple titles
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