Predictive capacity planning: A proactive approach

There are a number of difficulties associated with traditional capacity planning studies which adopt a 'fix-it-later' approach. An underestimation of the costs of remedial action which produces only incremental improvements is an example of such difficulties. To address these difficulties, a proactive approach is proposed which uses a prediction-based performance model within a capacity planning framework to recommend either the configuration for a new computer system or the reconfiguration of an installed system. The model used in the framework predicts the resource usage of applications, comprising the potential workload of a system, given the structure of the application programs, the resource usage of their basic components, and forecasted workload characteristics. This information is used to identify applications which may compete for certain system resources if they are executed concurrently in the system. By characterizing the resource usage of the forecasted workload, the occurrence of capacity problems may be pre-empted. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.