Good White Paper on Capacity Management by Microsoft

Capacity Management Overview
The Capacity Management SMF helps organizations achieve and sustain the IT service capacity requirements they need to support their business at a justifiable cost. For the purposes of this document, the term “capacity” is one of convenience, which, depending on the context, may imply resource capacity, such as storage, processor speed, network, or human resources, or an end-to-end IT service capacity, such as messaging, customer relationship management (CRM), or order processing. Many of the principles and suggestions for best practices still apply regardless of the type of capacity being optimized.
Capacity management is made up of three subprocesses:
• Business capacity management (BCM)
• Service capacity management (SCM)
• Resource capacity management (RCM)
These subprocesses all share a common set of activities that are applied from different perspectives. They include the following:
• Modeling
• Service monitoring
• Performance management
• Demand management
• Workload management
• Analysis
• Change initiation
• Optimization
• Trend analysis
Each of these subprocesses works toward the production and maintenance of a capacity plan and triggers requests for change through the appropriate channel. These activities all support the proper management of resources and service performance levels in order to conform to current and anticipated business requirements.




to read the full white paper please click on the link below -
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/solutionaccelerators/cits/mo/smf/smfcapmg.mspx#ESF