Monday, 9 November 2015 Blog ehdf

How to Better Plan your Network Capacity?

As companies adopt technologies such as cloud and virtualisation, planning for network capacity to meet bandwidth and application performance needs are also evolving. Through this article, we help you prepare for additional resource demands while avoiding over-provisioning.

Some steps to follow

1. Real time monitoring of the network and usage of programs that take up maximum bandwidth

2. Creating a reporting system to assess the network’s current status

3. Developing a management strategy based on the data collected from the reporting system

Quick tips

Effective network capacity planning is about applying an analytical and systematic approach to understanding business goals. Here are some tips to ensure better network capacity management planning:

Establishing a unified view of component capacity management data

Organisations need to centralize its archival and management interface for all components and elements and not take a compartmentalised approach towards data. It is important to have data integrated as this helps in understanding gaps and spikes in demand, helping in the decision making process

Creating capacity management competencies for applications and services

The integrated data will help understand the business service workload and the specific usage of resources. IT managers can then steer from component capacity management to evaluation of overall capacity.

‘What-if’ situational planning management

It is important for enterprises to plan for ‘what-if’ situations. This helps in preparing for the impact of hardware upgrades, virtualisation and cloud computing migrations on network capacity.

Upgrade, optimization and improvement

Regular upgrading of infrastructure helps in knowing if the new deployment is as per forecasted expectation or not, which in turn assists in better optimization of networks.

Avoiding over-provisioning

A good approach to managing over-provisioning is to actively balance the capacity supply and be vigilant of the server, storage and network capacity for both current and future workload requirements. Planning these in line with the business requirements can help avoid over-provisioning.