Data Management Glossary
Capacity Planning
What is capacity planning?
Capacity planning is the estimation of space, hardware, software, and connection infrastructure resources that will be needed a period of time. In reference to the enterprise environment, there is a common concern over whether or not there will be enough resources in place to handle an increasing number of users or interactions. The purpose of capacity planning is to have enough resources available to meet the anticipated need, at the right time, without accumulating unused resources. The goal is to match the resource of availability to the forecasted need, in the most cost-efficient manner for maximum data storage cost savings.
True data capacity planning means being able to look into the future and estimate future IT needs and efficiently plan where data is stored and how it is managed based on the SLA of the data. Not only must you meet the future business needs of fast-growing unstructured data, you must also stay within the organization’s tight IT budgets. And, as organizations are looking to reduce operational costs with the cloud (see cloud cost optimization), deciding what data can migrate to the cloud, and how to leverage the cloud without disrupting existing file-based users and applications becomes critical.
Data storage never shrinks, it just relentlessly gets bigger. Regardless of industry, organization size, or “software-defined” ecosystem, it is a constant stress-inducing challenge to stay ahead of the storage consumption rate. That challenge is not made any easier considering that typically organizations waste a staggering amount of data storage capacity, much of which can be attributed to improper capacity management.
Are you making capacity planning decisions without insight?
Komprise enables you to intelligently plan storage capacity, offset additional purchase of expensive storage, and extend the life of your existing data storage by providing visibility across your storage with key analytics on how data is growing and being used, and interactive what-if analysis on the ROI of using different data management objectives. Komprise moves data based on your objectives to secondary storage, object storage or cloud storage, of your choice while providing a file gateway for users and applications to transparently access the data exactly as before.
With an analytics-first approach, Komprise provides visibility into how data is growing and being used across storage silos. Storage administrators and IT leaders no longer have to make storage capacity planning decisions without insight. With Komprise Intelligent Data Management, you’ll understand how much more storage will be needed, when and how to streamline purchases during planning.
Why is storage capacity planning even more important as storage media prices increase?
Rising storage media prices, particularly for flash and high-performance systems, make capacity planning a critical enterprise IT priority. Without visibility into data growth and usage patterns, organizations often over-provision expensive storage or accelerate refresh cycles unnecessarily. Effective capacity planning helps IT teams forecast growth, reduce waste, and ensure high-performance storage is reserved for active workloads while controlling infrastructure costs.
What role does unstructured data management play in storage capacity planning?
Unstructured data management provides the visibility and automation needed to plan storage capacity effectively. By analyzing file and object storage environments, IT operations and infrastructure organizations can identify inactive data, duplicate files, and growth trends across datasets. This insight enables IT teams to reclaim unused capacity, move cold data to lower-cost storage tiers, and forecast future storage needs more accurately.
Learn more about Komprise Storage Refresh Assessment.
How important is the right approach to data tiering when planning a storage refresh?
Data tiering is a key strategy when planning a storage refresh because it helps reduce the amount of data that must remain on expensive primary storage. By identifying inactive files and transparently moving them to lower-cost object or cloud storage, organizations can significantly shrink the footprint of high-performance systems. The right tiering approach preserves transparent file access while lowering storage costs and extending the lifespan of new infrastructure investments.