Rethinking Capacity Management

Capacity management assures that sufficient supply of application capacity is online to continuously serve user demand with acceptable service quality. Demand management influences customer demand for a service and the provision of capacity to meet that demand. Performance management assures that user demand below online configured capacity is served with acceptable quality. Capacity management consists of two interlocked processes: capacity decision and planning; and capacity action fulfillment. This chapter discusses the following ICT capacity management models: traditional capacity management; ITIL capacity management; and eTOM capacity management. There are three fundamental capacity management problems of cloud computing: physical resource capacity management; virtual resource capacity management; and application capacity management. Service delivery to cloud service users can be viewed as a value chain in which cloud service users are served by cloud service customers via one or more network providers.