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.

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. In particular, traditional capacity management solutions suffer from a few shortcomings.

This whitepaper explores the traditional methods of managing capacity in the data center, the new approach IT must adopt to stay competitive and how you can assure application performance while scaling your infrastructure.