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Market Overview: Capacity Management And Planning Tools In 2013

by Jean-Pierre Garbani, April 18, 2013 | Updated: April 25, 2013 KEY TAKEAWAYS Justify Your Capacity Management And Planning Strategy Capacity is an exercise in defining the resources that will be needed to reach specific quality objectives. In the age of empowered users and IT to BT transformation, business service quality is linked to service quality and costs. Start With The Right Process The capacity management and planning offered by ITIL falls short of todays technology management. You need to use ITIL as a base from which to build your own process as business services evolve and require better performance. Then Select The Proper Solution Many diverse tools are on the market, from managing what you have to forecasting what you will need. Your strategic data center evolution dictates the type of tools that will support your capacity process.

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APRiL 18, 2013 | UPdATEd: APRiL 25, 2013

Market Overview: Capacity Management And Planning Tools In 2013

Reap The Agility And Financial Benefits From Emerging Infrastructure
by Jean-Pierre Garbani with Doug Washburn and Elizabeth Langer

WHY READ THIS REPOrt The emergence of inexpensive server technology and cloud infrastructure has caused many IT infrastructure and operations (I&O) professionals to simply dismiss the need for accurate workload and resource planning efforts. Why? Todays modular computing architectures, fueled by virtualization and different forms of clouds, promise flexible capacity to absorb increasing workloads. But this thinking is dangerous, because virtualization is dependent on properly managing and planning capacities in networks, storage, and computing power, and because the financial advantages of cloud depend on your ability to successfully plan the capacity required to run your applications. To reap the agility and financial benefits of emerging infrastructure, you cannot ignore capacity management and planning. This report evaluates the benefits of capacity management and planning, offers I&O professionals practical advice to implement capacity management and planning, and identifies the leading tools and vendors to consider.

Table Of Contents
2 Why Your Business Needs Capacity Management And Planning 3 How To Evaluate Capacity Management And Planning Tools 6 The Capacity Management And Planning Tool Market
WHAT iT MEANS

Notes & Resources

This report is based on vendor briefings and client inquiries on capacity management and planning.

Related Research Documents

Case Study: Managing Virtual Server Capacity November 7, 2012 Market Overview: Application Performance Management, Q4 2011 December 7, 2011 The New Capacity Planning Process Requires Three New Steps April 5, 2011

9 Capacity Management And Planning Is Core To Smarter Decisions

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Market Overview: Capacity Management And Planning Tools In 2013

wHY YOUr BUSInESS nEEDS cAPAcItY mAnAGEmEnt AnD PLAnnInG The original justification for capacity planning dates back to the mainframe era, when forecasting future workload, computing, and storage resources were mandated by delivery delays and optimization of capacity was critical as hardware expenses represented a significant portion of data center investments. But as hardware becomes commoditized and cheaper, capacity planning is seemingly obsolete. Moreover, server virtualization, which allows the consolidation of multiple physical machines into bigger ones, removes the administration costs from the equation and serves as another pretext to forgo capacity management and planning. Capacity Management And Planning Is Critical Despite Recent Infrastructure Trends Despite virtualization, commodity hardware, and cloud-based options, IT I&O professionals still need to prioritize capacity management and planning:

Despite cheaper hardware and virtualization, capacity management and planning is critical.
Dispensing with capacity management and planning is a myopic view of the problems data centers are facing. The availability of multiple choices of elastic deployments does not mean that we should ignore the fundamental justification of capacity management: Performance, quality, and cost of services are as important as ever. But its no longer a simple matter of optimizing CPU load; it becomes an optimization of the price/performance ratio of business services, which include software licenses; availability of power, cooling, and floor space; service availability; and the service value to the business itself.

Despite cloud infrastructure and software, capacity management and planning is critical.

Abstracting your infrastructure by using software-as-a-service (SaaS) and infrastructure-asa-service (IaaS) does not free you of the need to plan and manage capacity. Remember that these services use web access and transport data between you and the computing and storage resources, and that has a direct impact on security and network resources. So planning to use multiple SaaS applications alongside your in-house ones is likely to require more and more bandwidth on the corporate network as well as extra resources on a local server.1

The Scope Of Capacity Management And Planning Is Expanding The widespread adoption of virtualized server, storage, and network infrastructure plus cloud-based options is quickly expanding the traditional scope of capacity management and planning. I&O professionals should think of capacity management and planning when performing the following:

Planning physical resources. Network, computing, and storage all have physical limits that

need to be understood and forecast as the workload generated by the business increases. This

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Market Overview: Capacity Management And Planning Tools In 2013

also calls for forecasting the overall resource consumption of the data center, not only for costavoidance reasons but because many data centers could actually reach the limit of what is physically available in their geographic areas.

Placing virtual servers. This dictates the overall performance of the business services hosted

on the physical servers. Initial placement is not as easy as looking at CPU loads and memory consumption. You also need to look at the dynamic behavior of virtual servers to make sure that they are indeed compatible and do not conflict with each other on physical resources.

Optimizing virtual servers. Business services are very dynamic, and even an optimal

placement of virtual servers may hit snags due to workload variation. Monitoring performance and understanding which virtual servers are over- or under-allocated is an important part of capacity management. Monitoring usage also apply to license costs: As enterprises consolidate a mix of Microsoft Windows and Linux servers, the grouping of these servers on physical clusters must be optimized in terms of license costs.

Transitioning to the cloud. Understanding workload characteristics and requirements in

network, processing, and storage capacities, as well as service interdependencies, supports the decision to move applications into private and public clouds by providing a cost analysis and comparison between different options.

Deploying new applications. This is where planning takes all of its significance. Usually very

little is known about new applications, especially when testing is conducted on infrastructures that dont reflect the production deployment. The art of capacity planning is in using simulation or analytic tools to forecast the capacity requirements of new applications. Not doing so means that there is an important risk that not only the quality of service will be poor and unsatisfactory, but also that the poor performance will affect and spill over to existing business services hosted within the same physical environment.

HOw TO EVALUAtE CAPAcItY MAnAGEmEnt AnD PLAnnInG tOOLS To source capacity management and planning tools, I&O professionals should first understand what core capabilities or functional requirements are needed. While IT infrastructure library (ITIL) offers a logical approach, it falls short in practicality and in forecasting the needs of new applications. The reminder of this report offers I&O professionals practical advice on how to evaluate capacity management and planning tools. ITILs Accepted Layers Of Capacity Management Are Not Enough ITIL V3 defines three layers, or subprocesses, of capacity management: business capacity management (BCM), service capacity management (SCM), and resource capacity management

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Market Overview: Capacity Management And Planning Tools In 2013

(RCM). While this view of capacity planning and management is logically sound, it falls notably short in terms of practical implementation and planning future capacity. Nevertheless, Forrester recommends that I&O professionals be aware of ITILs approach:2

Business capacity management. This is where business demand is collected and converted into

quantifiable workload demand. This expresses what IT could expect from a given business entity in terms of business services and usage of these business services. The evolution, planned and unplanned of these business services determine the evolution of the capacity baseline. This is also where information about new service workloads can be collected.

Service capacity management. The business demand is expressed in terms of services and service
usage. The role of service management is to understand: 1) the service-level agreement that is applicable to this service, and 2) the dependencies of the service in terms of components. Using these two elements, service capacity management translates into requirements at the component level to insure the service capacity is optimized to meet service-level agreements (SLAs).

Resource capacity management. At the component level, workload information is transformed

into resource consumption information (for example, CPU, memory, and I/O loads). Through extrapolation of current consumption monitoring, you can estimate future needs and adjust the resources as a consequence.

Key Functional Requirements For Capacity Management And Planning Tools Capacity management is a logical process that tries to resolve multiple issues that affect the processing capacity of a given infrastructure. For example, the growth of an application workload, the migration of existing applications to new virtual platforms, or the implementation of standard packaged application all affect infrastructure sizing and performance prediction. To do this, information from different sources must be aggregated around service models before you can reach and study single components in detail. When evaluating capacity management and planning tools, I&O professionals should prioritize the following functional requirements:

Performance database. To perform capacity management, you need two things: information

that can be mined to determine historic trends; and a single source of truth, as you will probably share this information with multiple tools to achieve the right process results. A performance database is a repository of all performance information that you can collect from all potential sources and then mine.

Workload information. The basic unit of work is the transaction. The mix of transactions

reaching a server determines the workload. Each transaction consumes specific resources, and the transaction mix drives what we can measure in terms of CPU, memory, I/O, or storage requirements at the component level.

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Market Overview: Capacity Management And Planning Tools In 2013

Data center logistics. As capacity planning defines the future computing resources, it has now
to mitigate these future resources impact on the data center floor plan, cooling, and power requirements, as well as their impact on administration and other human resources.

Deep analysis. Especially when it comes to component analysis, tools that support one type

of component such as a server, storage, or network are typically unique to the type of component. Thus, be prepared to use multiple tools: The performance database importance is simply enhanced by the tool diversity.

Application performance management. Application performance management (APM)

collects data from all corners of infrastructures and applications, integrates this data into an analytical model, and provides the root cause of performance issues. Since you are now dealing with very dynamic workloads and the capability to quickly reallocate resources, APM is the essential product that will detect peak workloads and unexpected resource contention.

Application mapping. Todays business services are dependent on multiple distributed

applications and services. In this context, application mapping that provides a complete topology of component dependency is required. This could come from configuration management database (CMDB) discovery tools or from other tracing technologies.

Statistical functions. The data coming in needs to be cleaned of all transient and abnormal

measures to provide a solid basis for evaluation. The statistical function tells you what to expect in the future in terms of workload and resources usage, and what should be provisioned to maintain the service level.

What-if scenarios. Whether you are looking at a new application or have reached the

physical capacity of an infrastructure component, capacity planning needs to distinguish between temporary peak load absorption and trends. You must analyze inputs from capacity management to make that distinction and determine the need to permanently provision more resources for a given set of applications. Capacity planning requires the ability to perform a simulation or a mathematical analysis of future needs to help provision components.

Multiple capacity management information. To transition to cloud computing, you need data
from the placement and optimization of the different virtual components of the service. But you also need to examine the workload, through what-if scenarios, to understand how the new service will perform delivered through the Web, where latency and chattiness of the protocol may create performance issues.

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Market Overview: Capacity Management And Planning Tools In 2013

THE cAPAcItY mAnAGEmEnt AnD PLAnnInG tOOL mArkEt The capacity management and planning market is sometimes compared to alchemy. We often see the capacity planner as an alchemist trying to transmute lead into gold. But the dynamic nature of virtual and cloud environments coupled with fluid data means that this is an increasingly difficult and risky proposition, and I&O teams must be equipped with the appropriate tools (see Figure 1). To source the core capacity management and planning functionality outlined in the section above, I&O professionals need to focus on four categories of tools offered by several of vendors (see Figure 2).

Application performance management tools. APM tools offer infrastructure monitoring,

provide the performance and capacity of virtual and cloud environments, as well as trending and alerts to adjust the capacity allocations of virtual servers. APM tools address these key functional requirements listed in the section above: application performance, application mapping, and statistical functions. The following vendors offer APM tools: ASG, BMC Software, CA Technologies, Dell (Quest Software), HP, IBM Tivoli, TeamQuest, and uptime software.

Useful context on the tool landscape. BMCs Capacity Optimization tool is part of the BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management solution. Dells tool came through its acquisition of Quest Software. Metron offers Athene SharePath (as does ASG). Likewise, IBM and HP offer complete APM solutions that connect directly to their infrastructure capacity and cut across multiple infrastructure technologies, such as servers and storage. Although not exactly an APM tool, VMware vCenter Operations offers the capability to alert and troubleshoot performance issues linked to capacity.

Virtual optimization tools. Virtual optimization tools offer a complete virtualization capacity

management dashboard that lets you optimize your virtual environment and your cloud transformation based on monitoring and policies. Virtual optimization tools address these key functional requirements: application performance and statistical functions. The following vendors offer virtual optimization tools: BMC Software, CA Technologies, CiRBA, IBM Tivoli, TeamQuest, uptime software, and VMware.

Useful context on the tool landscape. A number of virtual optimization tools help I&O professionals plan their transition to the cloud. Here are a few examples: CiRBAs Transformation Analytics and Control Console excel at placement optimization that lets you optimize clusters from both an overall utilization perspective and a license cost standpoint. It also offers cloud transformation modeling, all of which is based on predefined policies and dependencies. IBM SmartCloud Monitoring provides performance and optimization for private cloud infrastructures. And VMwares vCenter Operations Management Suite lets you visualize and manage data centers with a path toward cloud transformation.

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Market Overview: Capacity Management And Planning Tools In 2013

Cloud transformation tools. Cloud transformation tools derive from traditional capacity planning
tools but lack the view of application dependency mapping, which would have to be factored manually (with the notable exception of VMware vCenter Operations Manager) or derive from virtualization optimization solutions that consider the group of applications and virtual machines to be sent to the cloud. Cloud transformation tools address these key functional requirements: what-if scenarios and multiple capacity management aggregation. The following vendors offer cloud transformation tools: BMC Software, CA Technologies, CiRBA, IBM Tivoli, TeamQuest, and VMware.

Useful context on the tool landscape. CiRBA for planning cloud migration allows users to define their own selection rules to help automate the evaluation and the selection of services that are cloud ready. In addition, VMware, BMC, and IBM, among others, present solutions in this domain.

Modeling and simulation tools. Modeling and simulation tools are based on either discrete

event simulation or mathematical analytics and closely resemble traditional capacity planning. Modeling and simulation tools address these key functional requirements: workload information, deep analysis of future physical requirements for new applications, data center logistics, and what-if scenarios for existing applications. The following vendors offer modeling and simulation tools: ASG, BMC Software, CA Technologies, Metron-Athene, and TeamQuest.

Useful context on the tool landscape. ASG acquired Perfman, one of the oldest names in capacity planning, to provide analysis and forecasting. BMC has traditionally been at the forefront of capacity planning, at the distributed, virtual, and mainframe level, with BMC Capacity Optimization Suite. CAs acquisition of Hyperformix provides a capacity planning solution based on discrete event simulation. Metron-Athene provides data collection and capacity analysis solutions supported by consulting services. And TeamQuest offers TeamQuest Predictor alongside its suite of IT service optimization products.

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Market Overview: Capacity Management And Planning Tools In 2013

Figure 1 The Toolbox Of Effective Capacity Management And Planning

Capacity planning:

Application resource usage profile New application evaluation What-if scenarios Physical resource dimension

Performance database

Application performance management

CMS

Performance analysis Workload evolution evaluation Conflict and contention real-time detection Orchestration and optimization Data center logistics Power management

Capacity management:

Financial management Procurement process Applications/ infrastructure end of life

Mitigation between new applications needs, legacy application evolution, and logistical-geographical constraints

Planning mitigation:

Overall capacity plan

86481 Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

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Market Overview: Capacity Management And Planning Tools In 2013

Figure 2 Capacity Management And Planning Tool Overview

Application performance management (APM) solution ASG-TMON ASG SharePath BMC APM CA Service Assurance BMC Capacity Optimization CA Virtual Placement Manager Capacity Control Console HP APM IBM SmartCloud APM Athene SharePath HP Service Health Optimizer IBM SmartCloud Monitoring Athene Sysload Foglight APM TeamQuest Analyzer up.time IT Performance Management Foglight APM TeamQuest Predictor/Surveyor up.time Capacity Planning vCenter Operations Management vCenter Operations Management vCenter Operations Management TeamQuest Predictor TeamQuest Predictor IBM SmartCloud Monitoring Athene Sysload Athene Sysload

Vendor ASG BMC Software CA Technologies CiRBA HP IBM Tivoli Metron-Athene Orsyp Quest Software (Dell) TeamQuest Uptime software VMware
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W H AT I T M E A N S

Virtual optimization

Cloud transformation Cloud Factory BMC Cloud Operations Management CA Capacity Manager Transformation Analytics

Modeling and simulation ASG-Perfman 2020 BMC Capacity Optimization CA Capacity Manager Capacity Control Console Matrix Operating Environment

Source: Forrester Research, Inc.

CAPAcItY mAnAGEmEnt AnD PLAnnInG IS cOrE tO SmArtEr DEcISIOnS Capacity planning and management is a boring subject. Its technical and invisible. It does not have the glamour of smartphones, tablets, and the latest app. Nobody cares about capacity until IT stops delivering the services that business users and customers expect. Because all business processes are more reliant on technology than ever, its critical for I&O executives to prioritize capacity management and planning, because:

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Market Overview: Capacity Management And Planning Tools In 2013

10

Virtualization and cloud create new complexities. Organizations that thought they

could dispense with capacity management and planning by using virtualization or cloud computing must think again. Realize that the complexity of these technologies actually reinforces the need for a more sophisticated capacity planning and management process.

Its no longer safe to rely on black arts. The new forms of computing offered by

virtualization, provisioning, and automation must lead to using a capacity planning and management tool set that understands resource contention and queuing in complex virtualized environments.

Capacity planning understands all costs of a given solution to reach more informed

decisions. Why? Because capacity planning transforms the business needs and requirements into actual IT models of what must be sourced. Capacity planning and management is not just the key element that allows IT organizations to manage end user performance and business productivity. Capacity planning and management also provides the basis for financial analysis and decision support in infrastructure optimization, facilitating good business decisions about which services to host and where.

EnDnOtES
1

See the following article on the CMG website about using SaaS solutions and the potential impact on capacity. Source: Ron Kaminski, Capacity Concerns in a SaaS and Cloud World, Computer Measurement Group, February 2010 (http://www.cmg.org/measureit/issues/mit66/m_66_2.html). Forrester has published its own view, related to ITIL V3, of the capacity management and planning process, which is a practical evolution of the ITIL V3 process. See the April 5, 2011, The New Capacity Planning Process Requires Three New Steps report.

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Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR) is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology. Forrester works with professionals in 17 key roles at major companies providing proprietary research, customer insight, consulting, events, and peer-to-peer executive programs. For more than 29 years, Forrester has been making IT, marketing, and technology industry leaders successful every day. For more information, visit www.forrester.com. 86481