Improve your capacity planning: don’t overprovision infrastructure

It's like leaving the lights on when nobody’s home

When you leave home, you turn the lights off before you leave (or so we hope), to avoid energy consumption and save money. So why then, are IT teams willing to accept the same with their infrastructure provision?

Overprovisioning: a potted history

The unpredictable nature of infrastructure provisioning has meant that businesses are accustomed to paying for more than they need on a ‘just in case’ basis, so there’s always the security of something in reserve. For businesses whose compute and storage usage often fluctuates, the accepted practice is to buy above what you think you’ll need, rather than risking being caught short and suffering system crashes. This means having more resource than you need on standby, which often results in surplus on-premises hardware – equipment that will be managed, powered, and cooled while not necessarily in use.

So, what’s the issue?

Monitoring how your capacity is used has historically been a challenge. We frequently see that poor monitoring capabilities leads to ‘just in case’ spiralling out of control: after all, if you don’t know how much capacity you are using, then how can you know how much you need and in turn how much extra is necessary to cover all eventualities? Without knowing this, you are repeatedly purchasing for peak activity without knowing exactly what capacity you already possess, or having the foresight for what you might need.

This costly exercise is one that many IT managers (and their purchasing departments) understandably resent, as it represents a huge portion of annual budgets that’s tied up as a contingency.

The journey to the cloud

Businesses are increasingly adopting a wide variety of PAYG consumption-led, cloud-based services, and getting a taste for what the cloud could offer in terms of their infrastructure. As a kneejerk reaction to the inflexibility of on-premises resources, and in their haste to capitalise on the benefits, many organisations are moving workloads to the cloud in swathes. However, this comes with its own issues. Without changing your approach to capacity, you’ll just migrate your on-prem woes into the cloud, where they will be more expensive to remediate.

Flexible provisioning

Operating a successful cloud infrastructure is different to on-premises, so it’s all about adjusting your approach to provisioning both accordingly. By sizing your on-prem resources close to the edge, you can burst into the cloud as and when resource demands, confident that you’re not wasting a penny. A well thought-out hybrid infrastructure strategy will mean that you get the best of both worlds; taking advantage of everything the cloud has to offer, whilst achieving economies in your on-prem environment. The result is an infrastructure that is flexible, grows with you and cuts out overprovisioning.

The result

Depending where you are on your journey to cloud, Servium’s various cloud services can help you get to grips with flexible capacity planning. With visibility into your usage of both cloud and on-prem resources you can save money, be leaner and not get caught short. Our VapourTrail Discover and Navigate services help you achieve better insight into your entire environment.

Introducing VapourTrail

Discover more about what you can gain from migrating to the cloud, and how our recently launched VapourTrail services can help you get the most out of your migration, by viewing the datasheets linked below:

• Book your free Discover assessment
• Better understand ongoing management and monitoring with VapourTrail Navigate

Ready to find out more? Get in touch.

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