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Avoid out-of-storage situations with accurate forecasting: the need for a storage capacity planning capability model.

Article Excerpt
A study by TheInfoPro revealed storage currently represents the biggest chunk of IT budgets at Fortune 1000 companies. With this much of a financial commitment dedicated to storage, why is it that companies often face emergency out-of-storage situations? How can companies avoid these emergency situations?

Storage infrastructure spending has become a top of mind issue as applications' insatiable thirst for computer storage has grown exponentially. Despite shrinking unit costs, yearly storage costs are rising faster than overall IT budget growth and have become an increasingly large part of the total IT hardware budget, often in excess of 50%. Since storage demand has been too difficult to determine or project due to the size, rate of change, and complexity of storage infrastructures, administrators significantly overprovision storage to avoid shortages. This has resulted in average storage usage of around 40% on non-mainframe systems. This low utilization is what IT organizations need to target and improve, significantly reducing Capital Expenditure (CapEx) spending. Therefore the process that IT organizations employ to determine their storage purchase requisitions is becoming a vital part of the IT planning process.

A Storage Capacity Planning process is a consistent, well-defined IT process of forecasting the amount of storage that will be needed over some future period of time for each application. The goal is to plan new capacity deployments at the right time to meet anticipated demand. The result is the significant reduction and improved predictability of CapEx spending.

A Storage Capacity Planning Capacity Model (SCPCM) is a very helpful tool for organizations to develop a storage capacity planning process that meets their business needs. A SCPCM provides the industry a consistent model to define and communicate:

Best industry practices for lowering "utilization threshold" for earlier out-of-storage alarms Where an IT organization's processes are now How an IT organization can modify its existing processes A roadmap of how to get to a desired state from an existing state A way to measure progress

OVERVIEW OF THE STORAGE CAPACITY PLANNING CAPABILITY MODEL

The SCPCM provides a framework for organizing capacity planning processes into four stages that lay successive foundations for continuous process improvement. These four stages define a simple scale for evaluating a storage capacity planning process capability. These stages also help an...

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