White Papers / Thought Leadership

How Much is Too Much: Optimizing Infrastructure Capacity In
Today's Financial Services Enterprise
Seth Rachlin and Mel Taub

Abstract: Though the period of exponentially growing Information Technology budgets is unlikely to return anytime soon, the large enterprise remains as dependent as ever on its technology infrastructure to meet its efficiency and growth objectives. In the Financial Services industry, this infrastructure is particularly important. Rigorous capacity planning and management is critical to serving the financial services industry. At their core, these disciplines are required to insure that the IT infrastructure can accommodate both the expected and unexpected needs of the business. A common rule of thumb suggests that firms should have twice the processing capacity they need to handle an average day's load. The reality is that most firms have quite a bit more than that. And since excess capacity costs money, they would like to do something about it.
The movement toward distributed computing infrastructures has eroded the transparency between business requirements and IT capacity. With systems now spread across multiple physical as well as logical elements all connected by a shared network within a shared data center, it is significantly more difficult to take kinds of vertical slices through the infrastructure which business-centric capacity planning and management requires.
Most of the current work in distributed capacity management takes place at the element level with its focus on servers, storage, and bandwidth. Creating a more holistic view requires connecting these elements to the logical services they provide - presentation, transaction management, messaging and middleware, and data. It requires as well connecting these same elements to the physical layer of space and power. As a final step, these three technology layers can be mapped at the logical level to the business services they are engineered to provide. This mapping, once complete, provides a foundation through which the IT organization can integrate the management tools associated with each layer into an information framework that can then provide a business-centric view of infrastructure capacity and empower the kinds of forward and contingency planning Financial Services Institutions depend on.

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