Capacity Planning for Your Company's IT Future

Capacity Planning for Your Company's IT Future

It's great day down in IT. Things are running like they should, the systems are responsive and the customers are happy. What more could you ask for? Then Monday morning rolls around and the systems are straining, customers are calling and complaining about slow performance and your systems are about ready to start smoking out the back end.

Many times in IT, we get complacent without even realizing it. When things are running well we tend not to think about the future. Yet without adequate capacity planning, IT systems that work well today, may strain when a new workload or an increased number of customers start hitting them. Unfortunately many organizations today simply do not have the resources to have dedicated capacity planning experts on staff. However, this doesn't mean that you can't take steps to help plan for your company's IT future.

Capacity planning doesn't have to be a complicated affair it can start out in most organizations by simply being actively involved with your end users to find out what they are planning. Getting updates from your marketing department, for example, can let you know ahead of time when they are planning to launch a new campaign that may increase traffic to your websites. Similarly, being involved with ongoing discussions in other departments about new initiatives, can give you an idea about future growth and business needs. This doesn't mean you have to be involved in every meeting, but rather ask them to include you in monthly or weekly summaries that may go out to other management personnel.

On the programming side of IT, you can help plan for the future by asking developers to start generating performance metrics in new code they delay. Not only does this help you judge application performance, but when you do get to the point in time when you begin evaluating new hardware and platforms, you can easily have historical data to compare against new metrics. You might be surprised to find out that "newer" hardware doesn't always mean increased performance. What you are running on those machines will ultimately determine what type of performance you are going to get in return.

Another way to get more involved in planning for your company's IT future is to use what data you have today to help plan for tomorrow. Look at your existing web logs and database transaction counts on a regular basis. Then, start keeping track of them in a historical view. You will begin to see your peaks and long-term trends. Once you have that data, you can forecast out future growth with even the more basic tools. Combine this information with the information you are starting to get from other departments, and you will find yourself ahead of the curve instead of trying to play catch-up down the road.

A few simple steps today, with a relatively low cost, can really help you get a hold on what the future holds for your IT resources. Proactive instead of reactive what a wonderful place to be in!

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