Avoid Unnecessary WAN Costs with Effective Capacity Planning

Capacity planning is an important, ongoing discipline that ensures your IT infrastructure can accommodate current and projected business demands while delivering consistently good application performance.

Read a Best Practices article on Network Capacity Planning

Capacity planning can avoid emergency provisioning of resources and affords buyers maximum negotiating leverage with their infrastructure providers, potentially resulting in millions of dollars saved.

Effective capacity planning requires more than utilization data; you need to know how resources are being used, by which users and applications, and when. Equally, you need to know the composition of traffic on each network segment and how the mix changes during daily, weekly, and monthly business cycles. And you need to understand the complex relationships between resource consumption and application performance, as well as where in the infrastructure bottlenecks are most likely to occur.

To be prepared for accurate capacity planning, it’s also important to distinguish between increases in resource consumption due to legitimate growth and those caused by non-sanctioned applications, such as music and video downloads for personal use, unscheduled backups during business hours, and rogue applications, such as worms. Without deep knowledge of the traffic flowing over the network, IT organizations may provision additional resources to address performance problems and see little or no resulting improvement. Conversely, with this knowledge, not only can unnecessary upgrades be avoided, but underutilized resources that can be reduced or reallocated can be readily identified.

A performance-first approach to managing your network infrastructure requires an understanding of the relationships between infrastructure use and application performance. These key network performance management elements are needed for this approach: end-to-end application response time, long term packet capture and analysis, network traffic analysis, device performance, and VoIP quality of experience.

The NetQoS Performance Center integrates all these in a single Web portal so that network engineers and capacity planners can measure how well the infrastructure is performing, locate places where latency is higher than normal and determine why, identify which applications and hosts are consuming bandwidth on expensive links, verify traffic volume and response times for mission-critical server farms, and so on.

In addition, the NetQoS Performance Center helps companies understand and validate the impact of changes to the network infrastructure. As enterprises deploy new applications and network services, understanding the impact of those changes on capacity and performance is critical. For example, measuring the impact of VoIP rollouts on network utilization and other applications is a key goal for many organizations as voice and data converge. Similarly, understanding the impact when moving from a traditional hub and spoke network to MPLS is critical.

Request an evaluation of the NetQoS Performance Center today.