This document discusses managing cloud capacity to control costs. It defines capacity management and planning, noting the goal is to right-size resources to meet business needs cost-effectively. Key differences in the cloud include elasticity and user self-service. Questions to address include workload trends, future plans, management systems, and optimizing costs. Effective reporting is critical to understand usage and justify investments. The presentation promotes a capacity management tool that provides a unified view of usage across platforms to proactively manage performance and costs.

1. Bring Down Costs by
Controlling Cloud Capacity

2. Housekeeping
Webcast Audio
• Today’s webcast audio is streamed through your computer speakers.
• If you need technical assistance with the web interface or audio,
please reach out to us using the chat window.
Questions Welcome
• Submit your questions at any time during the presentation
using the chat window.
• We will answer them during our Q&A session following the
presentation.
Recording and slides
• This webcast is being recorded. You will receive an
email following the webcast with a link to download
both the recording and the slides.
Jamie Baker
2

3. • Capacity Management Defined
• Capacity Management in the Cloud:
Key Differences and Questions to Address
• Reporting and ROI
• Q&A
Today’s Agenda
3

4. Capacity Management
Requirements

5. What is Capacity Management?
• The goal of capacity management is to ensure that IT resources are right-
sized to cost-effectively meet current and future business requirements.
What is Capacity Planning?
• The science and art of estimating or forecasting the space, computer
hardware, software and connection infrastructure resources that will be
needed over some future period of time.
• A typical capacity concern of many enterprises is whether sufficient
resources will be in place to handle an increasing number of requests as
the number of users or interactions increase.
The role of packaged software solutions
• Packaged software is available to capture performance and capacity data
and store that data for use in reporting, analysis, and modeling.
Capacity Management Defined
5

6. Manage costs while meeting
demands of the business today
and in the future
• Fewer costly and unplanned/panic
purchases means budgets are
easier to set and easier to meet
• Less physical and virtual sprawl
leads to lower hardware and
software costs as well as better
control of the environment
• Preventing costly performance and
capacity-related outages saves the
business considerable money
Meet SLAs in dynamic
environments requiring a
planned approach to capacity
and performance
• Best practice-aligned process
ensures there’s adequate
capacity now and in the future
• Business forecasts and
historical data allow for key
adjustments and
recommendations
• Mature process leads to a more
proactive and less reactive
organization
Effective Capacity
Management
Enables You to…
6

7. Capacity Management
is Different in the Cloud

8. Key Differences
8
Elasticity
• Grow/shrink infrastructure resources as
needed to adapt to workload changes
• Additional capacity available on-demand
(including auto-scaling)
• If you are willing to pay, it is almost
impossible to run out of capacity – but
costs can vary and go over budget
Self Service
• End users have the ability to provision
cloud resources on their own
• Some controls/management should be
put in place, but onus is typically on the
user to use the resources wisely – and
shut them down when finished
Compared with on-premises:
• IT plans for, purchases, manages and
decommissions all the physical resources
Compared with on-premises:
• Fixed infrastructure resources, capacity
• You must “live within your means”
Implications for Cloud:
• Focus is on optimizing cost. Understand:
• Historical trends for workload
peaks/troughs (seasonality, etc.)
• Business plans – new initiatives, etc.
• Cloud vendor pricing models
Implications for Cloud:
• IT has less control
• It is important to follow up on actual
usage – identify resources no longer in
use and decommission, reclaim them

9. Plan
• Which applications are best suited for the cloud (memory requirements,
dependencies on other applications, etc.)
• What are the historical trends of capacity usage on-premises and how might
they be different in the Cloud?
• Are there future business plans that will require additional resources?
• Historically, when do changes – peaks and dips – in workloads occur? Are
there seasonal variations?
• What management system do we put in place for user self-provisioning?
• What is the right size for our cloud instance(s) – and what are the costs
associated with changing?
Manage
• When will we saturate resources based on business growth?
• How can we increase the efficiency of our virtual hosts?
• Do we need to by more VMs, increase/decrease the size of the ones we are
using? Change the type?
• Do we need to increase/decrease storage?
Questions to Address
9

10. Reporting and ROI

11. Don’t Forget Reporting
Effective reporting is critical to your Cloud Capacity
Management initiatives. It provides:
• Understanding of what is going on in your environment today,
and using current and historical data, provides an insight into
what is likely to happen in the future
• The foundation of an effective business case for changes or
investments you will need to make
• Evidence of the ROI benefits derived from your cloud computing
investments, including:
• Current and potential growth in resource utilization
• Rightsizing cloud systems
• Easily categorize capacity related incidents
• Cost control
11

12. Business Drivers
• Prevent missed SLAs and service outages through proactive planning
• Manage the demand (Batch/Online)
• Reduction in MTTI / MTTR
• Single view of capacity (Business Service)
• Consolidation and/or replacement of displaced toolsets
• Expertise leaving the organization
• Regulation compliance and cost reduction initiatives
• Financial penalties
• On-premises data center vs. public cloud
• Workload and cost optimization
ROI: Cost Avoidance and Savings
12

13. Getting the cost information
• Who from?
• What data do we need?
• How is it related to the business?
Soft Skills
• How can we get buy-in?
• Our best communication approach
Process and Toolsets
• What’s in place
• Can the solution record and provide cost information
13
ROI Information Challenges

14. Elevate Capacity
Management

15. • Enables your organizations to implement effective cross-
platform capacity management by identifying over and
under-utilized and idle IT infrastructure resources, whether
on-premise or in the cloud.
• Provides a 360° view of IT services and infrastructure usage
while unifying and correlating data to proactively identify
potential service impacts, while helping to minimize risk
and lower costs.
• Replace labor-intensive spreadsheets and error prone
manual processes with an easy to use, automated capacity
planning solution.
Elevate Capacity Management
15

16. Sample Cost-Focused Reporting in Elevate Capacity Management
16

17. Q & A