A Comprehensive Guide To Infrastructure Capacity Planning Tools

Let's get on the ride of one of the popular K-dramas: Start-Up. This K-drama revolves around the life of Seo Dal-mi, Nam Do-san and Han Ji-pyeong, each with an interesting backstory. Today, we will focus on the protagonist – Nam Do-San (AKA Do-san), a savvy entrepreneur and founder of Samsan Tech. His curiosity for IT made him develop an app for visually impaired people. (Kudos, Do-san!)

Now let's assume Do-san wants to optimize his IT infrastructure to meet the current and future IT demands of Samsan Tech. A well-planned IT infrastructure will support his business initiatives and IT operational goals. It will also help him understand how much capacity he has in his current IT resources and what additional capacity is needed for scaling. This would require a strategic view of the capacity, performance, availability, usage and costs of his IT infrastructure.

Now the question arises, how will he do that? The answer is with the help of Infrastructure Capacity Planning Tools! These tools will help him identify and quantify the capacity needs of his business. This will be done by measuring current utilization levels, predicting future demand for different resources and creating a plan to meet that demand. That being said, let's take a quick look at the concept of these tools.

Infrastructure Capacity Planning Tools – Explained!

To understand these tools in detail, Do-san would need to break down this concept into three elements – IT infrastructure, capacity planning and finally, IT Infrastructure Capacity Planning Tools.

Let's begin with IT infrastructure. It’s an underlying framework that includes his computer networks, databases, software applications and processes, as well as the servers, storage devices and other hardware that support those systems.

Capacity planning is the process of monitoring system resources and tracking trends over time. It will him understand how much capacity he needs to meet performance targets, how much capacity he has and where he might need more capacity. The process of capacity planning will help him monitor usage, upgrade systems when necessary and track everything from performance metrics to detailed blueprints of servers.

Now comes the hero of the article – Infrastructure Capacity Planning Tools. These tools will bring together IT infrastructure and capacity planning. Besides, Do-san will be equipped with a comprehensive approach to planning, managing and reporting on IT capacity across all the servers, networks and applications. Infrastructure Capacity Planning Tools will make his IT infrastructure much stronger and will also enable him to identify where his infrastructure currently is and where it should be for successful future growth.


Interesting, right?

Now, of course, these tools didn't come about automatically, so let's figure out how these tools evolved.
 

History Of Infrastructure Capacity Planning Tools

Do-san, here's the timeline of Infrastructure Capacity Planning Tools at a glance: 
 

• It was the era of 1970 when capacity planners were used for collecting and analyzing data. These planners were also used for the creation of performance and capacity databases. Rudimentary modeling and forecasting methods (which were very simple and basic then) were introduced during this phase. During the 1980s, the commercialization of capacity planning tools was used as modeling tools.

• The 1990s made a grand entry with the introduction of client-server models. Also, there was a moderate explosion in the number of components in the infrastructure (servers, storage and network). Later, by the 2000s, there was an explosion in the number of servers and other infrastructure components, which required organizations to have comprehensive infrastructure capacity planning.

• Finally, 2010 opened the gates to the cloud (not literally, duh!), external service providers and hosting solutions which grabbed businesses' attention. Slowly, there was a massive increase in networked devices and Infrastructure Capacity Planning Tools came into existence for ever-increasing, diverse, dispersed and interconnected devices. 

We told you; the history of Infrastructure Capacity Planning Tools is quite interesting; now, let's get back to the present and unwrap the out-of-the-box working of these tools.

 

The Working Of Infrastructure Capacity Planning Tools – Decoded!

This is how Infrastructure Capacity Planning Tools work for the organizations like Samsan Tech which need solid infrastructure capacity planning.
 

• Monitoring Performance

  Infrastructure Capacity Planning Tools can enable Do-san to measure and monitor the performance of various resources like servers, storage, virtual machines, databases, applications, etc. It will help him understand how much capacity is available and how much is utilized to plan for future growth.

• Measuring Resource Usage 

  Infrastructure Capacity Planning Tools measure resource usage and performance of all the IT services. By measuring the current capacity and future growth requirements, Do-san can devise strategies to handle peak workloads while minimizing costs. The best Infrastructure Capacity Planning Tools will allow him to manage his IT resources in response to changing demand proactively. 

• Supporting Capacity Planning 

  These tools offer comprehensive capacity planning, management and optimization of virtualized and cloud environments quickly and efficiently. These tools also detect performance issues in physical, virtual and cloud environments. Besides, these tools will drill down and troubleshoot guest virtual machine performance issues in real time for Do-san.

Now, let's drive on to the next section and help Do-san understand why these tools are wheely great for his organization.
 

What Are The Benefits Of Infrastructure Capacity Planning Tools?

This is how Infrastructure Capacity Planning Tools will benefit Do-san:
 

• Effective Infrastructure Capacity Planning Tools ensure that the right investments are made at the best time to maximize ROI. These tools detail planned spending over time and against specific budget limits based on cash flow and IT expenses. 

• Infrastructure Capacity Planning Tools enable organizations to build capacity into their budgets and operational plans. It helps businesses understand what operational capacity looks like today and how it will change in the future. A well-structured capacity planning strategy helps organizations focus their investments and identify new opportunities.

• Today's enterprises are adopting microservices architectures at an accelerated pace to support digital transformation initiatives. Enterprises need scalable and efficient Infrastructure Capacity Planning Tools to monitor these modern architectures effectively. These tools handle the dynamic nature of microservices and other cloud-native services.

Let's go bananas as the very a-peeling future of Infrastructure Capacity Planning Tools is about to be revealed – read on.
 

What Are The Future Trends Of Infrastructure Capacity Planning Tools?

Put on your sunglasses as we are about to enter the spect-acular future of Infrastructure Capacity Planning Tools.

IT leaders are all set to introduce the data center-as-a-service (DCaaS) model. This model will upgrade the role of IT and resolve the issue of answering the what, when and how of IT infrastructures. DCaaS will allow IT vendors to deliver exemplary services, at the right pace, whenever needed. That way, the businesses can use cloud services and ensure that their underlying IT service and infrastructure capacity planning is on point to meet all demands.

Besides, predictive analytics will help enterprises with forecasting future trends and enabling risk assessments. So, combining capacity planning and predictive analytics will be another major trend in IT infrastructure capacity planning. The other breakthrough in the area will be the integration of IoT architecture. This architecture will help collaborate with business units to ensure that closed-loop IoT solutions are compatible with the central IT infrastructure and standard protocols being used.
 

Let's Wrap It Up!

Infrastructure capacity planning is identifying, monitoring and measuring system performance. It helps entrepreneurs such as Do-san understand how their IT resources are used so that they can make informed decisions about their future. With the rapid pace of change in the digital world, organizations are adopting new business strategies and practices to remain competitive.

Consequently, IT organizations must adopt an agile approach to managing the capacity and performance of their systems to meet current and future demands. Infrastructure Capacity Planning Tools are an agile approach that helps organizations identify whether their existing infrastructure is robust and where it could be more vital to better meet the organization's requirements for growth.