Capacity management is one of the processes involved in managing information technology (IT). The foremost concern is to guarantee that IT capacity can keep pace with the requirements of both present and future business, while remaining cost effective. As viewed through the lens of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), capacity management is primarily composed of three sub-processes: service capacity management, business capacity management, and component capacity management (essentially, management of available resources).
Seeing as the demands placed on IT systems tend to grow over time as service and functionality are increased, the capacity of the system resources must grow as well. In situations where the capacity management team can understand the current demands being placed on their system, as well as the potential fluctuations enabled by these demands, they can plan for the future in a manner which is less speculative and far more accurate.
This process, termed capacity planning is designed with the ultimate goal of striking an ideal balance between capacity and usage. To illustrate this in oversimplified terms, picture two systems: one in which capacity is too low and there is a backlog of information, and the other in which capacity is higher than necessary, resulting in expensive equipment being underutilized.
Both scenarios can cost an organization a significant amount of money; the former in lost revenues, and the latter through increased overhead. The ideal balance would usually be somewhere in between, where there is enough capacity to handle all the current needs of the business, as well as some significant although not astronomical room for growth. Occasionally, companies will choose to dramatically increase network capacity when a significant increase in demand is anticipated, but for most businesses, to do such would be prohibitively expensive.
The actual modification of the system in order to handle higher scalability is known as performance tuning. First, potential problems must be identified and quantitatively estimated relative to benchmarks of acceptable performance. Second, a physical measurement of the system’s performance is taken prior to modification. After that, the team identifies the parts of the system which must be improved in order to handle the higher capacity. These are known as the system’s bottlenecks. The specified components are then either modified or replaced, and lastly, a post-operative measurement is taken, to ensure that the procedure was actually successful.
In addition, the capacity management team is often responsible for software profiling, which is essentially an investigation with the end goal of determining how programs could be made to run using fewer system resources. It is usually accomplished with a performance analysis tool known as a code profiler, which measures the length of time it takes data to get from point A to point B, as well as recording the number of times this journey is made. Using code profilers and other related tools, the capacity management team can identify portions of a program’s code that aren’t as lean as they theoretically could be, and software revisions are usually made in response to these findings.
The capacity management team is essentially in charge of ensuring that, through one means or another, an organization’s IT system will never experience an unnecessary backlog of information. As a result of their work, the IT department will always have the necessary system resources to perform any and all of the tasks with which they are presented.
