What is Green Capacity Management?

Today, capacity management is focused on reducing costs by trying to control server sprawl, maintain control of excess distributed systems and reduce numbers through consolidation. New technologies such as the Cloud help to lower costs – but only if they are effectively managed. Without proper capacity management disciplines in place, many organizations simply over-provision and over-spend on IT infrastructure to ensure they have adequate capacity. As companies work to grow and maintain their green initiatives, they need a clear understanding of how efficient their IT infrastructure is from an energy and resource usage perspective. The central goal of capacity management has been the same for decades - to provide adequate capacity at controlled costs. The only difference now is the complex nature of IT infrastructure and the need to manage many disparate systems which must balance the ability to support the infrastructure while maximizing energy efficiency and minimizing environmental impact concerns which are at the heart of all green initiatives.

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The Importance of Capacity Management to Your Green Initiatives

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The Importance of Capacity Management to Your Green Initiatives

Green Capacity Management Drivers, Methods and Technologies

Important Business Drivers

Cost avoidance. Green IT follows the principals of “do more with less”. Cost savings can be made in IT by following green principles.

Reduce carbon emissions. Data centers that reduce their CO2 emissions will also reduce their energy bills (OpEx) and total cost of ownership. By managing CO2 emissions, they will be better prepared for existing or future greenhouse gas (GHG) regulations.

Achieve an ISO standard. The ISO (International Organization for Standardization) standards for greenhouse gas accounting and verification, provide government and industry with an integrated set of tools for programs aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions - as well as for emissions trading.

Methods and Technologies

Optimizing performance for cost reduction

One of the fundamental ways that green capacity management can benefit today’s enterprises is the cost savings realized from utilizing fewer servers.

Having fewer servers results in:

• Less transport, heating, lighting and ancillary power usage

• Potentially fewer people required to manage the servers

• More modern systems

• More efficient use of power

• Greater recyclability

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The Importance of Capacity Management to Your Green Initiatives

Meeting SLAs to reduce the risk of business changes

General business users won’t be interested in the details about what servers are hosting which applications or how the IT infrastructure is architected. They are only concerned that SLAs are met. When looking at capacity management, be sure that whatever solution you choose

• Maintains performance

• Provides business assurance

• Works with legacy applications

• Helps you to have a good understanding of the technology and capacity

Aligning IT with the business to reduce the risk of infrastructure changes

Rather than just capacity management at the component level, the solution must support business- and service-focused processes.

Without a clear capacity management process, companies often lack the knowledge they need to align the amount of resources necessary to most efficiently align with the business goals. Often, these business processes and requirements are considered from a perspective that is too “siloed” and isolated. Consequently, relationships between components, services and the business aren’t understood and considered. The capacity management team needs the right tools in place to plan effectively on meeting the business’s needs while minimizing the environment impact of the IT systems.

The Importance of a Mature Capacity Management Process

Capacity management is often one of the last processes to be implemented, as it is seen as too difficult and/or costly or not necessary. As a result, the process suffers from a lack of resources - people, tools and an understanding of the technologies that are available today.

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The Importance of Capacity Management to Your Green Initiatives

Some companies have a basic process with some aspects done well, e.g. monitoring, and others done on an ad-hoc basis, e.g. planning. The mix of tools, techniques and staff in silos means that there is little consistency and little repeatability. With this type of approach, you are always going to be struggling to understand what the business is going to need and how your green initiatives will be impacted. Monitoring each service, its components and how the applications are performing is key, but problems and inefficiencies arise whenever there is a mixture of tools and a lack of unification across the organization.

To best serve green initiatives, companies need to ensure that they are maturing the capacity management process by focusing on having the right information, tools, models, and solution.

Information

Receiving high-quality and correct information is one of today’s biggest capacity management challenges. Trying to get the necessary information can be difficult, and experience proves that the best way to do this is to involve the business in the process at an early stage by using a combination of interviews and workshops.

Having a way to bring all the information together in a single system is one of the most important aspects when it comes to bringing the business the information it needs. Instead of providing CPU and memory graphs, you can start to provide information views that have a larger impact. Working with other areas of service management will ensure that you are working across other processes.

The business users need to be directly involved via regular updates in the form of presentations, emails and reports. This is vital to achieving the required buy-in and confidence in the capacity management process.

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The Importance of Capacity Management to Your Green Initiatives

Tools

There are several different options when it comes to having the correct tool for the job at-hand. Ideally, you want to have one tool that works across the enterprise – making use of all existing frameworks and bringing together all the data.

When implementing tools to capture the data you need, consider and plan for the following challenges:

• Installing and configuring frameworks and agents

• Capturing data across the enterprise

• Capturing data from the Cloud

• Reducing time to value (showing the value of capacity management quickly)

• Powerful BI systems that take a long time to implement

Models

Modelling is an important factor when it comes to implementing capacity management for things like moving to virtualization or the Cloud. Modeling is a way to predict, based on current behaviors and growth rates, the future impact that the changes will have on the business and services. It adds value to capacity management because it also helps to get the most use out of your existing IT Infrastructure and helps you choose the greenest options for new hardware while achieving service levels.

The Solution

The world’s leading companies rely on Syncsort’s Elevate Capacity Management cross-platform capacity management software. Syncsort’s Elevate Capacity Management can be managed on-premise by the organization’s capacity management staff or can be configured and run in the Cloud.

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The Importance of Capacity Management to Your Green Initiatives

Quick and Easy Analytics

Syncsort’s Elevate Capacity Management provides analysis of current and recent system performance, identifying challenges and advising what course of action is required to restore service levels. Reports are automatically scheduled for production, and you’ll have complete flexibility to tailor all reports.

User-defined templates are stored for re-use, and it’s possible to analyze a wide array of performance data, letting you quickly home in on potential problem areas. Metrics are displayed, summarized and correlated with others for trending. Results are saved for later examination, printing or copying as tables or pictures into World, Excel or PowerPoint.

Data from Any Source

Syncsort’s Elevate Capacity Management provides a 360-degree view of capacity, covering everything from your server to storage and networks. Whatever the operating platform, storage technology or business data, Elevate Capacity Management can be tailored to meet your specific needs using Syncsort’s off-the-shelf Capture Packs – or by quickly and easily creating your own.

Interactive Web-Based Reporting

Syncsort’s Elevate Capacity Management ServiceView provides interactive, web-based short-, medium- and long-term views of performance and capacity challenges across all your services – with automatic prediction of time left before any change is needed. It combines the ability to group multiple servers, instances and applications into business services while displaying their associated capacity health.

All this makes it easy to use Syncsort’s Elevate Capacity Management ServiceView to change infrastructure in line with business impact to minimize IT infrastructure costs, focus technical skills on the right issues at the right time, and ensure user satisfaction with proactive action plans to guarantee service quality.

To learn more about Syncsort’s Elevate Capacity Management solution visit: https://www.syncsort.com/en/products/elevate-capacity-management

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About Syncsort

Syncsort is the global leader in Big Iron to Big Data software. We organize data everywhere to keep the world working – the same data that powers machine learning, AI and predictive analytics. We use our decades of experience so that more than 7,000 customers, including 84 of the Fortune 100, can quickly extract value from their critical data anytime, anywhere. Our products provide a simple way to optimize, integrate, assure and advance data, helping to solve for the present and prepare for the future. Learn more at syncsort.com.

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