Capacity Management in the Modern Data Center

Solving the intelligent workload management problem

Published February 2017

Capacity management as an operational discipline has existed since the advent of server-based computing, dating back to the age of the mainframe. Commercial tools to support this discipline have existed for more than 30 years with each successive generation of server platform creating its own unique requirements.

As the data center evolved from mainframes to mid range computing and from client server to visualized, the demand for capacity management tools has evolved in tandem. The introduction of virtualization in particular introduced the Intelligent Workload Management (IWM) problem where capacity management was no longer a sufficient solution to assuring application performance.