BMC Capacity Management BMC Capacity Management delivers business-aware capacity planning for modern data

centers — comprised of physical, virtual, and cloud technologies — by linking IT

resources to measurable business impact. It combines flexible visualization, automated

exception-based analysis and reporting, and a wide range of planning capabilities to

provide a comprehensive solution for ensuring cost-effective, optimal business service

performance and alignment.

DATASHEET

Figure 1. Quickly identify over and underutilized systems and areas of unused capacity

Key Benefits » Leverage modern, elastic

architectures to deliver services faster with minimal risk

» Promote unified visibility across IT departments, better align IT and the business, and increase IT agility and control

» Effectively respond to business demand, while reducing operating and capital expenditures

» Remove impediments for effective capacity management; placing the power of capacity management within everyone’s reach

» Better support the business by streamlining operational processes

Business Challenge Organizations in every market segment require IT to continuously anticipate and meet the changing

capacity needs of the business, while also ensuring optimal performance and cost. Enterprises with siloed,

heterogeneous environments struggle to manage and plan for service performance and capacity needs

effectively. Moreover, the shared and dynamic nature of virtual and cloud technologies increases risk when

the demand for IT resources exceeds available capacity. In order to avoid poor performance, frequent

outages, missed SLAs, and unplanned expenditures, companies are adopting continuous, business-aware

capacity management as a new approach to IT resource optimization.

Effective capacity management balances cost against capacity (and supply against demand) to ensure that

sufficient IT resources are available to meet current and future business requirements. Unfortunately, for the

majority of IT organizations with an already over-burdened staff, capacity management remains an

unattainable goal. Enterprises cannot rely solely on a manual approach and highly skilled capacity planners;

new tools providing a high degree of

automation and integration are required.

The BMC Solution BMC Capacity Management is an easy-to-use,

“business-aware” solution that doesn’t require

specialist skills to implement or use. It provides

all the analysis, forecasting, modeling, and

reporting capabilities you need to implement a

continuous, comprehensive, and structured

capacity management process.

With BMC Capacity Management, you can

automatically identify under-utilized or over-

utilized servers; accurately plan, implement,

and manage your virtualization and cloud computing initiatives; and continuously optimize your data center

resources — all with your existing IT staff. Moreover, by linking business key performance indicators (KPIs)

with resource utilization data, you can relate your capacity needs to business drivers in order to improve

decision-making.

BMC Capacity Management provides process-level data collection technology, as well as the ability to

integrate performance metrics related to any IT resource (physical and virtual servers, databases,

middleware, storage, networks, facilities, and more) or business service. Data sourcing options include third-

party performance management tools, standard interfaces and protocols, and custom repositories.

Moreover, the solution integrates with BMC’s comprehensive portfolio of Business Service Management

(BSM) solutions, including BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management, the BMC Atrium CMDB, and

BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping.

BMC Capacity Management is based on a robust and scalable architecture with an open and extensible

capacity database (CDB). It provides powerful and modern visualization capabilities to easily enable

consistent analysis, modeling, and reporting across today’s complex, heterogeneous environments.

Figure 3. Identify business growth scenarios (utilization vs. orders) with estimated saturation point

Figure 2. Automatically forecast growth and notify users of impending saturation date

Why BMC » Enterprise-wide capacity

management: Create comprehensive, technical, and business views of enterprise resources by linking IT resources (physical and virtual servers, databases, applications, storage, networks, and facilities) with business KPIs

» Business-aware capacity planning: Continuously align IT capacity and business demand

» Automated capacity management: Perform exception-based analysis and modeling, and generate reports

» Hybrid data center optimization: Optimize workload allocation for physical, virtual, and cloud environments

» Unified BSM architecture: Integrate discovery, configuration, performance, and capacity management

Analyze and Forecast Business Service Performance BMC Capacity Management provides sophisticated,

yet easy-to-use, analysis and forecasting capabilities

that enable you to rapidly identify resource/service

trends and requirements to deliver consistent

performance that meets or exceeds expectations.

» Analyze application performance running in a physical, virtual, or cloud environment with a wide range of views

» Analyze resource utilization with respect to

business cycles to identify busiest periods, periodical behaviors, and baselines

» Identify how operational and process events, such as incidents, maintenance, or change events, consume resources that impact performance

» Analyze aggregated resources at different levels, such as physical clusters or any other logical groupings, and generate “typical” utilization profiles

» Predict saturation dates and residual capacity with comprehensive forecasting techniques, such as linear, last-ramp detection, time-shifts, exponential, logarithmic, Holt-Winters, and Box and Jenkins

» Automatically identify and notify users of resource saturations or deviations from baselines ahead of time — before services are impacted

» Track the servers and applications in an n-tier application that make up overall response time

» Analyze application utilization and non-linear response time in terms of CPU service, CPU queuing, and I/O service and wait time

Align IT Capacity to Business Drivers BMC Capacity Management enables users to optimize service performance and hardware spend by

modeling the impact a business change, such as increasing the number of customer orders, will have on

performance and response time. It provides a broad range of predictive capabilities, including correlation

and analytic modeling, extrapolation analysis, and “what-if” scenarios that support a proactive approach to

prevent service disruptions and continuously align capacity with business demand.

» Analyze how capacity needs are related to business drivers by correlating resource performance with business KPIs, such as identifying the storage space requirements of customer relationship management (CRM) users

» Estimate saturation points in terms of business metrics, such as identifying the maximum number of transactions that can be supported by the current infrastructure

» Model how infrastructure changes, such as horizontal/vertical scaling, and business changes, such as business trends, impact resource utilization and service response time

» Identify bottlenecks and required additional capacity to support expected/desired growth in terms of business KPIs, while also respecting thresholds on resource utilization and response times

» Evaluate and compare different hardware options with respect to standard (SPEC, TPC-C) or custom benchmarks, as well as to other criteria, such as overall cost or compliance with Green IT guidelines

Deliver Optimal Consolidation, Virtualization, and Cloud Plans BMC Capacity Management reduces the risk of migrating applications to private and hybrid clouds with

comprehensive consolidation, virtualization, and cloud planning capabilities — across a full range of

provisioning options.

Figure 4. Design, manage, and optimize virtual and cloud infrastructures with policy-based planning

Business Benefits

» Cost reduction: Infrastructure right-sizing and timely (also known as ”just-in-time”) provisioning enable savings on both hardware and operating costs.

» Risk avoidance: Automated notification of forecasted capacity issues improves service availability and guarantees higher levels of service.

» Safe consolidation: Placement simulation and optimization enables safe data center consolidation, virtualization, and cloud initiatives.

» IT and business alignment: Correlation between capacity needs and business drivers ensures that IT infrastructures always match service demands.

Using policy-based planning, BMC Capacity Management takes business, technical, and compliance

constraints into consideration to identify the optimal

workload placement that will ensure workload

compatibility, minimize resource contention, and use

the least amount of resources.

» Gain a comprehensive view of shared resources, including physical utilization at the host level and virtual utilization at the virtual machine level

» Model consolidation, virtualization, and cloud activities by identifying best candidates, targets, and placement scenarios with respect to technical, geographical, and business criteria

» Identify required additional resources and best configurations at the virtualization layer, including data store and memory requirements associated to these scenarios

» Automatically forecast resource utilization in the cloud with respect to business KPIs

» Account for resource consumption and “show” or “charge” costs back to users or other accounting entities using different cost modeling options, including fixed, allocated, or utilization models

» Simulate how changes in cost models might affect accounting and chargeback analysis and reports

Deliver Automated, Exception-Based Analysis, Reports, and Plans BMC Capacity Management visualization capabilities, powered by a robust CDB, enable consistent,

common reporting across today’s complex, heterogeneous environments. A variety of performance reports

and graphs can be created automatically or in response to ad hoc queries. Graphs and reports can be

tailored to answer specific questions or provide exact data views. By focusing on areas of interest, you can

refine data views, isolate the root cause of a problem, and discover potential solutions.

The solution includes advanced statistical analysis capabilities that examine business drivers for long-term

patterns, typical use, and response-time peaks and valleys. After understanding normal performance

characteristics, it delivers exception reports automatically. All performance reports and graphs can be

reviewed and refined through the intuitive interface that provides an interactive, self-service capability for

system administrators and business users who want insight into the overall performance of their application

servers. A web-based interface provides dynamic access to performance information, with best-practice

views that foster communication between performance staff and business owners.

» Allow business and technical users access to user-friendly web console and easily-customizable web dashboard to view graphs and reports according to their specific roles

» Monitor forecasted issues and deviations from baselines and automatically notify users (e.g. via mail to defined recipients with attached by-exception reports)

» Leverage the embedded reporting engine (based on Eclipse BIRT) to design, generate, and publish scheduled, on-demand, and by-exception reports in PDF, HTML, RTF, PPT, and other formats.

Leverage Multiple Data Sources and Detailed Performance Data Effective capacity management begins with efficient and accurate performance data collection. BMC

Capacity Management provides the most flexible and comprehensive data collection options on the market

today. IT organizations can use their existing data sources or deploy BMC data collection. Users can quickly

and easily leverage their existing performance and business data for capacity analysis, reporting, and

planning using out-of-the-box data connectors or creating custom connectors as needed. Sample data

sources include:

» BMC: BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management, BMC PATROL, and BMC Atrium

» Third-party: VMware vCenter, MS SCOM, Citrix Xen Server, and nMon

» Standard Interfaces and Protocols: WMI, SAR, SNMP, and JMX

Figure 5. Track the components in an n-tier application that makeup overall response time

» Custom: CSV files, application log files, and custom databases

For companies that lack performance data or

require the added accuracy and detail of

granular process-level performance data, BMC

Capacity Management includes data collection

capabilities that cover physical and virtual

systems on UNIX®, Linux®, and Windows

operating systems. Data collection is scalable

with low overhead and highly granular

sampling intervals. As user volume increases, applications are added, or infrastructure grows, performance

data collection continues without interruption, omission, manual intervention, or increased overhead to the

server. BMC Capacity Management can be configured for agentless data collection from VMware ESX and

Microsoft Windows, providing all the benefits of granular data collection without the administrative burden.

Superior server configuration data collection, coupled with the most sophisticated and automatic techniques

for matching performance benchmarks with measured configurations, ensures accurate results for P2P,

P2V, and V2V capacity planning studies. Patented technology ensures a near 100 percent data-capture

rate that is unique in the industry, providing a business advantage unmatched by any other solution. This

technology provides a foundation for current performance reporting, sizing, and analytic modeling results.

Real-time data, as well as near-term, detailed, historical data, is also available, allowing continuous access

to detailed, accurate data for performance through capacity planning activities.

Drive Business Value through a Unified BSM Architecture Business Service Management (BSM) is a comprehensive approach and unified platform that

simultaneously optimizes IT costs, demonstrates transparency, increases business value, controls risk, and

assures quality of service. BSM simplifies, standardizes, and automates IT processes, so you can efficiently

manage business services throughout their lifecycle — across distributed, mainframe, virtual, and cloud-

based resources.

BMC Capacity Management enables IT Operations to deliver real business value through integration with

third-party and BMC tools, such as the BMC Atrium CMDB, BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency

Mapping and BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management.

Integration with the BMC Atrium CMDB BMC Capacity Management leverages business service relationships stored in the BMC Atrium CMDB to

deliver precise capacity analysis, reporting, and planning based on the current service configurations.

Leveraging existing configuration items (CIs) and service relationships defined in the BMC Atrium CMDB

ensures consistency and eliminates the need to maintain the same information in multiple tools.

Integration with BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping

Using BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping, BMC Capacity Management has visibility into all

physical and virtual resources currently deployed in your data center. Though this integration, BMC

Capacity Management can analyze performance and capacity utilization and design the optimal mix of

physical and virtual resources that will maintain performance and quality of service (QOS).

Integration with BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management BMC Capacity Management integrates with BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management for an end-to-

end view of business-service performance and capacity. Though this integration, your IT operations staff

can manage every stage of the performance management workflow cycle by delivering real-time analytics,

historical data analysis, long-term capacity planning, and performance tuning.

For More Information To learn more on BMC Capacity Management, please visit www.bmc.com/capacitymanagement

BUSINESS RUNS ON I.T. I.T. RUNS ON BMC SOFTWARE. Business thrives when IT runs smarter,

faster, and stronger. That’s why the most

demanding IT organizations in the world

rely on BMC Software across both

distributed and mainframe environments.

Recognized as the leader in Business

Service Management, BMC provides a

comprehensive and unified platform that

helps IT organizations cut cost, reduce

risk, and drive business profit. For the

four fiscal quarters ended September 30,

2010, BMC revenue was approximately

$1.96 billion.

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