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Market Guide for Capacity Management Tools

Published: 30 January 2015

Analyst(s): Ian Head, Milind Govekar

Infrastructure and operations leaders expect performance, availability, rapid

deployment and predictable investment flows from IT infrastructures.
Capacity management tools help I&O teams plan and optimize IT
infrastructures and tools, and balance the use of external and cloud service
providers.

Key Findings
Most organizations are underinvested in capacity management, both as a process discipline
and also in the tools required to support the process.
No single IT infrastructure capacity management tool excels in all technology segments.
Many organizations depend on complex, but undocumented, Excel-based capacity
management tools with associated dependencies on the individual practitioners and authors of
the tools. This business risk is rarely acknowledged by IT or infrastructure and operations
leaders.
Most organizations would improve service availability, reduce deployment times and improve
investment forecasting by developing a capacity management process and investing in tools to
support the stated process objectives.

Recommendations
Before investing in capacity management tools, ensure that there is clear capacity management
process ownership with defined process objectives, metrics, defined process outputs and
consumers.
Ensure that your tools provide functionality to segment IT services into critical services that
merit capacity modeling and planning, and those for which historical trending and forecasting is
sufficient.
Check that both the tool functionality and the road map match your current and midterm needs.
Compare the user interfaces of different tools using simulations or pilot studies with your most
important use cases.
 Strategic Planning Assumption
Through 2018, more than 30% of enterprises will use IT infrastructure capacity management tools
for their critical infrastructures to gain competitive advantage, up from less than 5% in 2014.

Market Definition
IT infrastructure capacity management tools should be used as part of the capacity and
performance management process. These tools may also be used in an ad hoc fashion by less
mature organizations, but it is difficult to extract the full value of the tool without clear process
objectives and ownership.

It is common to build on domain-specific, performance-gathering tools. Hence, capacity

management tools include functionality to analyze data from a variety of sources to produce
utilization trends, and forecast reports for a certain scope of the IT infrastructure. The more
advanced tools are able to provide information on performance-constraining factors and
performance optimization automation or advice for the scope of the infrastructure covered by the
tool.

Thus, IT infrastructure-capacity-planning tools can generate infrastructure-capacity-related reports,

are able to perform historical data analysis and capacity-related analytics, and have IT and business
scenario-planning abilities. In this research, some of the tools from the vendors covered have the
breadth and depth of this functionality and some have limited capabilities across this spectrum of
capabilities. This research is not a comprehensive list of capabilities or vendors, it is a
representative sample of vendors in this market.

These tools are distinguished by the breadth of their capabilities in terms of their integration with
data from a variety of domain-specific tools (e.g., real-time performance-monitoring tools); by their
ability to provide forecasts, advice and automation for a wide variety of different types of
infrastructure components; by the depth of their analysis of the underlying factors contributing to
the performance of the infrastructure; and their support for what-if scenarios and their integration
with online analytical processing (OLAP) business-reporting tools.

Market Direction
1
The rising need to invest in capacity management skills and tools has a number of drivers.
Digitalization produces pressure for high-performing infrastructures that are agile and are capable of
deploying new services rapidly and cost-competitively. At the same time, in-house data center
costs are being compared with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and cloud service providers. This is
forcing a rethinking of the older buy-more-hardware-when-needed philosophies that used little
more than in-house, Excel-based tools to gather limited historical utilization data to forecast future
capacity needs.

In these conditions, homegrown tools quickly become a liability, as the enterprise's dependence on
individuals and poorly documented Excel scripts are exposed. This may happen when events such

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 as acquisitions, rapid growth or critical new projects demanding rapid deployment, and an elastic
infrastructure occur.

Investment in capacity management processes and tools helps alleviate these issues and provide
considerable competitive advantage. Vendors are seizing the opportunity offered by end-users'
difficulties in grappling with the demands of agile methods and digitalized businesses to show how
their tools can reduce costs and risk and enhance performance.

Although storage and network functionality is often less advanced than server capacity
management, an established set of vendors and tools covers all or most of the infrastructure
software and hardware components and provides good trending and forecasting functionality.
These may be extended with good modeling and planning capabilities, sometimes with additional
tools from other vendors. The established vendors are focused on ensuring that they can import
data from a wide variety of sources and vendors and bring this data together to present helpful
information to decision makers on forecasting demand, optimizing the environment, and planning
for additional capacity and investment.

Specialist vendors offer in-depth functionality for a part of the infrastructure, such as the virtual
server and storage area network (SAN) environments. These vendors offer more-detailed and
effective optimization of their chosen environments and may also offer advice or automatic
optimization in near-real time. As organizations increase the proportion of the infrastructure that's
virtualized, and introduce private and hybrid clouds, these vendors see their chosen segments of
the infrastructure growing in importance.

Segmentation is also opening up opportunities for IT operations analytics (ITOA) vendors to make
more targeted use of the log file and performance information to provide specific utilization
forecasting and performance optimization advice. Although ITOA vendors have their advocates in
the capacity-planning field, there is a lack of comprehensive and well-supported, capacity-planning
add-ons that provide the same degree of guaranteed support, appropriate functionality and
comparable capacity-focused user interface functionality. This prohibits the consideration of ITOA
tools in this market. This is likely to change in the next year or so.

Although many of the tools in the guide provide some network capacity management functionality,
deeper functionality is usually found in specific network performance monitoring and diagnostic
(NPMD) tools, that can be used for in-depth capacity and performance management in this area
(see the "Magic Quadrant for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics").

Market Analysis
The IT infrastructure capacity management tool market includes:

General tools with wide applicability across all or nearly all of the IT infrastructure estate
Tools targeted at specific subsegments of the infrastructure, such as the virtual server estate or
database performance optimization

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 In this first edition of the Capacity Management Tools Market Guide, generalist ITOA vendors have
not been included. Gartner expects general ITOA vendors to eventually target this space more
specifically. This will require the release of toolkits or adapters that serve the capacity and
performance management needs of infrastructure leaders precisely. They may be produced by the
vendor or the user community; however, they must be generally available and supported so that
they may be relied on by infrastructure leaders to provide products that are regularly updated to
meet their changing infrastructure technology needs. Although such toolkits are not widely in use,
we expect to see them emerge into wider use during the next one to two years.

Representative Vendors
The vendors listed in this Market Guide do not imply an exhaustive list. This section is intended to
provide more understanding of the market and its offerings.

Many vendors were not evaluated that also provide infrastructure-monitoring and related
functionality that may be used to a greater or lesser extent to forecast capacity requirements and
optimize performance. Those not evaluated include AccelOps, AppFirst, Blue Elephant, Centerity,
Centreon, Circonus, Datadog, eG Innovations, Fujitsu, GroundWork, Heroix, HP, Interlink Software,
Ipswitch, Kaseya, LogicMonitor, LogMatrix, ManageEngine, Nagios, ServiceNow, NEC, Opsview,
OP5, Oracle, Paessler, ScienceLogic, Scout, Server Density, ServersCheck, SevOne, Spiceworks,
Tango/04 Computing Group, Zabbix and Zenoss.

Vendors such as Microsoft are building platforms for collecting and storing performance data that
can be used for capacity analytics using Microsoft's own capacity analytics tools (yet to be
launched) or with other third-party analytics tools. Thus, Microsoft is not included as a vendor in this
Market Guide, although all the vendors considered do make use of data from Microsoft tools and
utilities.
2
The following vendors are representative of the range of capabilities available in this space.

Allen Systems Group

Allen Systems Group (ASG) is a privately held company headquartered in Naples, Florida. It
employs around 1,000 staff and has development locations in North America and Europe. Product
development for its capacity management products takes place in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Its
total revenue in 2013 was more than $276 million.

ASG's capacity management product, Perfman, is targeted at the mainframe and distributed
system server environments. Its key value proposition is providing broad functionality by gathering
data across a wide range of environments, which is summarized and analyzed for trending,
forecasting and modeling. Perfman Analyst module provides modeling and limited what-if analysis
capabilities on the data collected for physical and virtual environments.

Infrastructure data (e.g., CPU usage, memory and disk input/output [I/O]) is collected from the
platform it monitors. For example, on Unix (AIX, HP/UX, etc.) it collects data using sar, iostat and
other operating system utilities; on Windows, it uses the performance counters in the registry; and,

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 on VMware, it uses VMware Infrastructure (VI) to collect data in an agentless manner. It also uses
scripting to generate and automate infrastructure performance reports. Perfman Portal is a
customizable Web interface that is used for reporting and displaying summarized data, reports and
service forecasts. This user interface is available as a thin client, thick client, Web client and a
mobile client. On the mainframe, Perfman uses the Systems Management Facility (SMF) records or
integrates with its mainframe performance monitor product (TMON) to collect data. Perfman does
not support cloud environments. Most of Perfman's installed base is on the mainframe.

ASG mainly sells this product through its direct sales force and has one base license for all the
Perfman modules.

Strengths:

For many enterprises, Perfman has the required capacity management functionality at a
comparatively low price.
It is easy to install and easy to use.

Challenges:

Perfman does not provide what-if modeling for physical to virtual (P2V), virtual to virtual (V2V) or
cloud environments.
Reports of default on its debt suggest some financial distress, and, although there has since
been a reorganization of ASG's debt, it is unclear whether additional investment capital has
been made available to ASG since S&P withdrew financial ratings for the company and placed
the company on its CreditWatch list. (see "S&P Withdraws Credit Ratings for Troubled Naples-
Based Allen Systems Group Inc.," "TEXT-S&P Cuts Allen Systems Group to 'CCC-,'" "Moody's:
Allen Systems Group, Inc." and "Allen Systems Group Receives New Investment From GSO,
KKR and Franklin Square").

BMC Software
BMC Software was acquired in September 2013 by a private equity group led by Bain Capital and
Golden Gate Capital. Its headquarters is in Houston, Texas, with approximately 6,000 people
worldwide. BMC's TrueSight Capacity Optimization product development takes place in Milan
(Italy); Lexington, Massachusetts; and Pune (India).

The TrueSight Capacity Optimization tool has multidimensional analytics capability (e.g., OLAP), for
mainframe and distributed systems, and a diverse set of forecasting algorithms that can be applied
across various infrastructure components and services, with OpenStack support recently released.
This enables it to model various business (what-if) and IT scenarios (P2V, V2V and virtual to cloud
[V2C], etc.) and assess their impact on the service, infrastructure and applications. It also has the
capability to generate automated reports, including showback and chargeback, identifying the
optimal workload placements in a physical and virtual environment using a "tree-map" visual
interface.

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 TrueSight Capacity Optimization integrates with cloud management platform technologies, such as
Cloud Life Cycle Management (CLM) from BMC to extend CLM's capacity and workload placement
visibility into private and public cloud environments. Furthermore, it has out-of-the-box integration
with various monitoring tools to collect data to improve infrastructure efficiency and identify
underutilized infrastructure. It is also used for forecasting infrastructure resources for budgetary
reasons and can produce periodic (monthly or quarterly) reports that identify risks and
recommended actions.

TrueSight Capacity Optimization can also be integrated with discovery tools, service catalogs and
configuration management databases (CMDBs), where organizations have implemented them, to
identify and manage service capacity, and where a service can go across infrastructure (server,
storage and network, etc.) and applications. The product has standard views that can be
customized for different roles, such as capacity planners, infrastructure administrators, cloud and
storage managers, service managers, operations managers, business owners or financial managers.

BMC licenses its TrueSight products in four different configurations.

Strengths:

Highly flexible integration to collect data from heterogeneous physical, virtual and cloud
environments.
Good regression modeling and forecasting capabilities.

Challenges:

Although TrueSight is integrated with a wide range of data sources, if the data source is not part
of a standard connector, users have to learn and write Perl scripts. Comma-separated values
(CSV) format integration (as used by spreadsheets) may require customized integration.
Users may need to become proficient in the BIRT-based report graphical designer for
automated and highly customized, user-specific reports.

CA Technologies
CA Technologies is a Nasdaq listed company headquartered in New York, New York, with a
worldwide presence and development resource in Framingham, Massachusetts; Austin, Texas; and
India. It has 13,000 employees globally, with revenue of more than $4.5 billion.

The CA Capacity Management solution (CCM) is a heterogeneous capacity management tool

targeted at distributed systems, including physical, virtual and cloud environments. It collects data
from a wide variety of sources, including infrastructure performance data from existing monitoring
tools and CMDBs, as well as application performance management (APM) data. This is stored in its
capacity management repository to perform what-if analysis and modeling. It supports physical,
virtual and cloud environments, including Microsoft and VMware, with workload placement
summaries that highlight the areas of improvement and risk. It provides trend analysis for physical
and virtual servers and heat-map-based reporting.

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 The CCM also has the ability to include data center infrastructure management (DCIM) data for
managing power, space and cooling capacity, as part of its converged capacity management
capabilities. Its P2V, V2V and V2C modeling capabilities include cost parameters to show potential
savings for recommended configurations. CCM has a Windows client (that is not fully browser
enabled), which is used for modeling and analytics and also provides role-based access.

CA sells this product through its direct sales force as well as partners, with four different licensing
bundles.

Strengths:

In addition to server and application capacity, CCM functionality includes the physical aspects
of the data center (e.g., power, cooling and space resources).
The CCM has easy-to-use performance analysis, forecasting and modeling capabilities.

Challenges:

The CCM toolset has limited functionality for sizing and optimizing capacity in public cloud
environments (e.g., Amazon and Azure).
The product has limited out-of-the-box capacity management capabilities for network and
storage infrastructure.

Cirba
Cirba is a privately held company headquartered in Ontario, Canada. It has 125 employees and has
development offices in Ontario, Canada. It has regional sales offices throughout the U.S. and in
London, U.K. Cirba's annual revenue is undisclosed.

Cirba's products are focused on the virtual server and storage (SAN) environments. Cirba's capacity
management capabilities are based on Cirba's analytics engine. In addition to providing capacity
management, it has the ability to optimize and align infrastructure resources, so that the IT
infrastructure demand is matched to the IT infrastructure supply in an optimized manner. This
enables the user to make optimal and automated workload placement decisions that are driven by
policies. These policies can reflect performance, capacity, business, or security rules or technical
constraints or may be driven by software requirements (e.g., to lower licensing costs). Thus, its
technology is more suited to virtualized and cloud infrastructure environments than traditional
network or physical infrastructure environments.

Cirba's tool has an easy-to-use console to visualize and model infrastructure reservation, model
future capacity bookings and demand, and provide capacity forecasts, where services can be
modeled by business units or departments. This ability to manage capacity and optimize workload
placements is useful for on-premises and cloud environments, so this product provides integration
and intelligence to cloud management platform (CMP) technologies, such as VMware's vRealize
Automation suite, IBM Cloud Orchestrator and OpenStack. It also has a standard set of APIs that
can be used for automation, including adjusting virtual machine (VM) allocations to optimize the use

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 of CPU and memory, and for integrating and driving the Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) in
VMware environments. These APIs can also be used to integrate with other IT operations
management (ITOM) tools.

Cirba mainly sells this product through direct sales; however, it also has a service provider and
system integrator (SI) partner network that uses and sells this tool. It is sold on a subscription basis,
based on the number of systems analyzed and the modules being used and deployed.

Strengths:

Pioneers in intuitive UIs including heat maps for capacity management visualization
Advanced functionality in areas of workload placement, automation, and capacity reservation
management

Challenges:

Product more suited for virtual environments than physical environments

Limited support for network capacity planning and management

Dell
Dell is a privately held company headquartered in Texas. It employs more than 100,000 people
worldwide, with relevant development performed in Aliso Viejo, California. As a private company
since 2013, Dell no longer discloses its revenue.

Dell's capacity management product is Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition (through the
acquisition of Quest Software), which is targeted mainly at virtualized enterprise environments. It is
a scalable product that is easy to integrate with various monitoring data sources. Monitoring data is
collected in an agentless manner from APIs, including vCenter, WMI, and other OS and hypervisor-
level utilities. This data is then analyzed by the analytics engine to show real-time and historical data
mainly for VMware and, more recently, Hyper-V-based, virtualized environments. The tool can also
perform analytics to show capacity on virtualized infrastructures, and generate capacity reports and
display alerts on a browser-based, thin-client graphical user interface (GUI). The analytics engine
provides VM placement, workload allocation advice and capacity reservation with auto-deployment
of VMs in the reserved area. It also provides chargeback and showback by groups for cost
allocation.

Dell packages three different products:

Foglight for Virtualization, Free Edition (freemium model through vKernel's acquisition)
Foglight for Virtualization, Standard Edition (acquired through vKernel)
Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition (acquired through Quest)

Enterprises typically buy the Enterprise Edition through Dell's direct sales channel.

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 Strengths:

Enterprise Edition is an easy-to-implement and scalable product.

Customer references report satisfaction with the level of support they get for Dell's capacity
management product.

Challenges:

Although additional functionality is due for release in 2015, the product is currently more suited
for virtual environments than physical or cloud environments, and has limited network and
storage capacity management capability.
Dell has multiple products that lack integration or advanced functionality e.g., heat maps and
P2V, V2V and V2C modeling.

IBM
IBM is a publicly listed company headquartered in Armonk, New York. It employs more than
430,000 people worldwide. IBM's total revenue in 2013 was nearly $99.8 billion. IBM does not
disclose the specific locations where its capacity management products are developed. IBM's
capacity planning and management capabilities are mainly focused on server (mainly for VMware
and Power VM) and storage capacity planning. These capabilities are delivered through a set of
performance-monitoring and capacity-planning tools that share a performance database. These
tools are SmartCloud Monitoring and SmartCloud APM, Tivoli Netcool Performance Manager
(TNPM), IBM SmartCloud Virtual Storage Center (VSC) and Optim Configuration Manager.

There are two separate user interfaces for capacity planning and management. One targeted at the
server capacity planner and another targeted at the storage capacity planner. These tools provide
reports for tuning and optimizing storage and server environments from performance data collected
from its own monitoring tools and from virtual platform environments, such as VMware vCenter and
System p VIOS or from integrating with NetApp. The tools can also use IBM Cognos engine for
capacity management reporting for VMware and PowerVM.

IBM's capacity management solutions do not integrate with other third-party monitoring tools.
Some of IBM's capacity-planning tools, such as VSC, provide access to its data and analytics to
other applications using agents and other interfaces for chargeback and other purposes. These
tools also have resource utilization, trending and historical data analysis capability for physical and
virtual storage environments. What-if analysis is used to plan for scenarios such as an increase in
VMs, workloads and service levels. IBM also has a number of database performance tools that can
provide input into a capacity management process.

IBM packages and sells these products either individually or as a package through its passport
advantage scheme. Although IBM has started to use digital marketing and sales partnerships, most
of its sales are through direct sales channels.

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 Strengths:

I&O leaders have stronger product and account relationships with IBM than most competitors.
IBM is able to bundle many products effectively as part of a wider and larger portfolio.

Challenges:

Enterprises looking for point capacity planning and management products do not have IBM on
their shortlists.
Achieving full product functionality and integration may be a significant professional services
task.

Metron
Originally a U.K. company, Metron's head office and development team is in Somerset, U.K., with a
U.S. head office in California, reflecting its core business focus on Europe and North America.
Metron works through partners in some locations, including Japan and South Africa, and has
software technology partners that add technology breadth to the product. Metron is highly focused
on the capacity management field, with fewer than 50 full-time staff providing software tools and
professional services. Metron is privately held and does not publish its revenue.

The capacity management toolset is called athene. It's centered on the physical server and storage
environment; however, it extends its capabilities across the infrastructure by importing data from a
variety of vendor tools, with presentation via a browser-based user interface for its "360-degree
capacity management" philosophy. Data capture may be either agent-based or agentless, with links
into the major infrastructure monitoring tools, including those from CA, HP and IBM. Coverage is
good for the common environments. Although athene's functionality covers a range of virtual
environments, it lacks depth of functionality, compared with some virtualization capacity
management specialist tools. Athene avoids placing a reporting load on the target systems by
holding all the required monitoring and reporting data in its own capacity management information
system (CMIS).

In addition to trend-based forecasting, Metron advises users to identify the most critical business
services and perform deeper-dive capacity modeling and planning on those systems. This enables
users to take advantage of the extensive, but more time-consuming, predictive capabilities of
athene, combining trending, analytical modeling and business activity pattern matching to provide
more-accurate capacity and performance forecasts for those services.

Athene is modular and is supplied as a one-time software purchase with annual maintenance, and
the company has recently launched SaaS and managed service offerings. The tool has local
support in some countries with third-line support from the U.K. Capacity management consultancy
services are also available for those who would rather not maintain the skills in-house.

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 Strengths:

Good breadth of infrastructure coverage with integration packs for most infrastructure
components, from network and storage to databases and mainframes. Network and storage
capabilities have been a focus for recent development.
A strong consultancy pedigree provides a user perspective to product development.

Challenges:

Some key functionality is delivered through partners (such as IIM in Japan) for automated
analysis and recommendations on z/OS mainframes.
In virtual and cloud environments, some specialist tools provide additional analytics and
automated optimization.

NetIQ
NetIQ is a principal brand of Micro Focus International, as a part of a merger completed in
November 2014. Headquartered in Houston, Texas, the company employs 1,600 people worldwide,
with relevant development performed at its headquarters in Houston; Provo, Utah; and Bangalore,
India.

NetIQ's PlateSpin Recon provides visual analysis and forecasting for consolidating and optimizing
the data center, which includes the physical data center infrastructure (e.g., power and cooling). It
collects hardware (CPU, memory, network cards, storage, etc.); software; and service inventory
data for server workloads (Windows, Unix and Linux, etc.), as well as virtual infrastructure, such as
VMware vCenter, Microsoft Hyper-V and Xen. PlateSpin Recon can remotely gather workload
utilization to determine how resources are being used. It can also work with utilization data gathered
by third-party monitoring tools. Recon collects and monitors the rate of change of storage data in
terms of disk blocks, which can be useful for data recovery tools where block-level transfers take
place.

PlateSpin Recon includes Reporting and Consolidation Planning modules. The Consolidation
Planning module determines the optimal fit between server resource supply and workload demand.
Recon's consolidation scenarios and what-if scenario planning help visualize the characteristics of
server workloads before and after consolidation, and determine the servers required for
consolidation. Consolidation plans can be exported directly into PlateSpin Migrate for execution.
These tools can also be used with virtual infrastructures to increase consolidation ratios, and to plan
workload placement. PlateSpin Recon has the ability to generate trending and forecasting reports to
highlight overutilized and underutilized machines, including virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI)
environments for VMware.

NetIQ sells this product directly and through partners and resellers.

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 Strengths:

PlateSpin has strong P2V and V2V planning and modeling functionality.
Hosted virtual desktop (HVD) or VDI size planning and forecasting identifies underutilized
desktops and desktops that need more resources.

Challenges:

PlateSpin lacks visibility in the capacity management market.

PlateSpin Recon has limited support for network and external cloud environments.

SolarWinds
Founded in 1999, SolarWinds has more than 150,000 customers worldwide and revenue of more
than $400 million. SolarWinds is a publicly quoted company that employs 1,700 people in 11
countries across North America, Europe and the Asia/Pacific (APAC) region. Product development
is mainly in the U.S. and Europe. Its initial public offering (IPO) in 2009 stated a vision to "manage
the performance all things IT anywhere." This has been reflected in the acquisition of a dozen
companies since 2011, including Pingdom, Confio and N-Able Technologies.

Although there are a few channel partners, SolarWinds sales are mainly direct, with the target
purchasers being IT practitioners responsible for managing and sustaining IT infrastructures. This
bottom-up marketing strategy is supported through downloadable, fully functional, 30-day product
trials that can be up and running in less than an hour. Users are able to monitor their infrastructures,
resolve problems and produce reports to justify their purchase to more senior management.

SolarWinds products are mainly focused on availability and performance functionality, with capacity
management as one feature of the products. The products are well-integrated and provide breadth
of scope across the server, virtualization, database, storage, network and security elements of the
infrastructure. The product set has demonstrated the ability to scale to thousands of VMs and disks,
with a federated data collection architecture to facilitate the management of multiple data centers.
SolarWinds offers some physical and virtual discovery capabilities, and it also imports configuration
and monitoring data from other vendor's tools.

SolarWinds Virtualization Manager is licensed by the number of processor sockets on the physical
hardware running the hypervisor. SolarWinds Storage Manager is licensed by the total number of
disks in the SAN or network-attached storage (NAS) devices being managed.

Strengths:

User-defined, real-time dashboards and integrated product sets provide good visibility of the
infrastructure, with good performance analytics and trend-based forecasting using a variety of
usage profiles.
A low-overhead sales model supports competitive pricing with capable capacity and
performance management across the entire in-house IT infrastructure.

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 Challenges:

The aggressive recent acquisitions mean that users should confirm that the needed product
components are able to seamlessly exchange the required information, and are truly integrated.
Although the reporting functionality is adequate for a technical audience, there is limited
reporting capabilities for a business audience, who may be key stakeholders.

Sumerian
With its head office and development in Edinburgh, Scotland, and its main sales office in London,
Sumerian has been established for more than 12 years as a capacity management consultancy.
This is a privately held business, with a staff of 40, approximately 100 clients and a turnover of more
than $3 million per annum. It sells direct to end users, primarily in the U.K. and the rest of Europe
and has an especially strong financial sector presence. There is no sales presence in the U.S. or
other locations, so support outside Europe is limited.

Building on its consultancy business, Sumerian entered the capacity and performance tool market
in 2012. Unusually in this market, it has chosen a SaaS model for its Capacity Planner toolset.

The core functionality is concerned with workloads consuming server and storage resource. Other
than the import of third-party data, network utilization analysis is limited. Sumerian Capacity Planner
has a unique and powerful user interface that enables users to visualize all or part of their IT
infrastructure in a "Sunburst" style, which can zoom in and out to adjust the scope from individual
VMs to hosts, clusters and data centers. This allows users to visualize and model workloads,
uncover performance bottlenecks and perform predictive analytics on the performance. The
predictive forecasting includes time series and anomaly detection to assist with understanding
current performance in detail and forecasting future performance in a variety of scenarios.
Comparisons between 90-day baselines of historical data assist with uncovering patterns of
business activity that is a step above basic trend-based forecasting.

Being a SaaS model, the reporting is not in real time. Hence, it will generally lag current data by
several days. Nevertheless, the tool provides deep insight into the allocation and performance of the
workloads, supporting segmentation of the application estate by business criticality. What-if
scenarios can be modeled and visualized quickly, to provide forecasts of the performance of
resources and workloads.

Data may be imported from the usual server, storage and network devices and hypervisors,
including common mainframes where modeling extends to the individual logical partition of a
computer's resources (LPAR). An SQL data store is used for the capacity and performance data
that underpins the product.

Licensing is via a monthly fee, based on a per-user model (with a five-user minimum) plus a monthly
fee per server being managed.

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 Strengths:

The visual Sunburst-style user interface is designed specifically for engineers analyzing and
optimizing their IT infrastructures.
The SaaS model enables users to perform fully functional capacity management without storing
the large amounts of required data on their own premises.

Challenges:

SaaS nature of the product means that it does not facilitate near-real-time performance
optimization, but is more targeted at capacity planning and predictive analytics.
Although infrastructure predictive analytics and modeling are included in the tool, the extended
application-level analytics capabilities are only available through the purchase of additional
consultancy services.

TeamQuest
Founded in 1991, TeamQuest has a worldwide staff of 150, global turnover of more than $30 million
and a global customer base of more than 300 organizations. The company is privately held and
headquartered in Clear Lake, Iowa, with direct sales offices in Europe, and partners serving Latin
America and Asia via Hong Kong. Product development is in the U.S. and Western Europe.

The TeamQuest "IT Service Optimization" product set brings capacity-planning capability to all
infrastructure components and services, although network capacity and performance analytics only
consider high-level utilization. The product consists of four core components:

Analyzer for performance analysis

Predictor for straight capacity planning
Surveyor for dynamic and automated analytics and reporting
The CMIS, which collects and stores the capacity- and performance-related information

The use of automation and queuing theory in the analytics allows a deep level of insight into
performance issues (throughput and response time) in the infrastructure. This provides good
predictive and remediation capabilities across a broad infrastructure scope, from the component
level to the workload and IT service. The CMIS may be federated to accommodate global
infrastructures, such as those with multiple data centers.

With adapters for the common monitoring products and data sources, this product blends capacity
management with performance optimization and is extending its functionality into ITOA to provide
automated solutions to many performance issues across the physical, virtual and cloud estate.

Licensing is based in the number of physical servers and the number of terabytes of storage being
managed.

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 Strengths:

Strong user interface, modeling and automated analytics extending into some system
administration functions.
This is a capable out-of-the-box solution.
Predictive analytics for a broad scope of the infrastructure including power consumption and
the major SAN providers through a partnership with IntelliMagic.

Challenges:

Some users will accept lower functionality, lower-priced products that may even be bundled in
with other software or consultancy services.
In highly virtualized or cloud environments, the specialist vendors still provide deeper levels of
resource optimization.

Virtual Instruments
Founded in 2008, Virtual Instruments has offices in the U.S., U.K., Australia, Hong Kong and
Singapore, and more than 300 employees. The head office is in San Jose, California, with product
development in the U.S. and the U.K. A strong network of Alliance Partners and major name
resellers is consistent with VI's claimed success in penetrating 38 of the Fortune 100 companies. VI
has more than 300 customers, but is a private company and does not disclose revenue.

Virtual Instruments' product, VirtualWisdom4, optimizes infrastructure performance by analyzing the

traffic in the Fibre Channel, rather than by conventional capacity management techniques. The
forecasting, trending and modeling capabilities are not targeted at capacity management for the full
scope of the IT infrastructure. However, because the data packets traverse the SAN, a great deal of
information and insight may be gleaned from the traffic. Therefore, the VI product set helps to
achieve optimal use of the infrastructure resources. This has clear implications for limiting the need
for additional capacity.

The heart of the technology deployed by Virtual Instruments are probes, which are placed in the
SAN Fibre Channel and give the VirtualWisdom4 product the unusual capability of being able to
inspect every packet that traverses the Fibre Channel, without placing additional loads on the
computing, storage or network devices. The toolset aggregates and analyzes the huge amounts of
data from the probes to uncover and resolve the sometimes subtle causes of latencies in an
infrastructure. There are adapters for the major physical, virtual and mainframe environments.

The browser-based user interface is flexible, and it is targeted at analytics and performance
optimization, with strong reporting functionality for those use cases.

VirtualWisdom4 is hosted on a dedicated appliance, and a perpetual license fee is payable for each
instance.

Gartner, Inc. | G00262546 Page 15 of 21

 Strengths:

Extremely detailed insight into the Fibre Channel activity enables VirtualWisdom4 to uncover
performance constraints that are difficult to find with other technologies.
The Fibre Channel probe technology places no additional load on infrastructure computing,
storage or network components.

Challenges:

VirtualWisdom4 is designed for performance optimization and providing insight into constraints,
rather than capacity planning; consequently, the capacity forecasting, scenario analysis and
modeling are limited.
Being deployed in the Fibre Channel, the insight into network devices, traffic and diagnostics is
limited.

VMTurbo
The first release of VMTurbo was in 2010, and this privately held company now has offices in
Boston, New York and Reading, U.K. Development is located in New York. The current CEO, Ben
Nye joined in 2013, and the company now exceeds $30 million turnover, with a staff of more than
260 and 1,000 paying customers.

VMTurbo Operations Manager is distributed direct, as well as through a number of established

channel partners, according to the location and size of the target customer. Direct support is mainly
provided remotely from the U.S. and U.K. offices.

VMTurbo Operations Manager is focused on controlling the application workload, virtual server
estate, and public and private cloud environments. It also has modules for closely related
technologies, such as Storage and Fabric Control. VMTurbo uses an economic model whereby
entities in the data center (such as applications, virtual and physical servers, storage and network
elements) are represented as buyers and sellers of resources, with the resources represented as
commodities traded between these entities. The utilization of these resources is abstracted as a
price. The resulting market of "buyers" and "sellers" allows the allocation of workloads to be
optimized, based on the target class of service and the value the business receives from the service
associated with the workload.

The user interface allows assurance of the performance of the workloads and identification of
constraints. Then, automated or manual intervention may be made to prevent performance or
capacity problems in the virtual and cloud environment before they affect users. Modeling and
what-if functionality allows users to analyze service quality, while managing business risk. Capacity
planning is provided by the control platform, enabling capacity plans to be created, based on real-
time and historical operational data.

The free Virtual Health Monitor product is distributed as an unlimited renewable license while
VMTurbo Operations Manager is priced on a per-socket basis on either perpetual or term licensing.

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 Strengths:

Resource allocation is based on economic principles to assure the performance of services and
workloads. This enables services to be prioritized and overall performance assured, based on
performance, cost and risk.
Infrastructure resources may be allocated in real time, in response to changing application
workload demand.

Challenges:

The product reviewed had little support for network capacity planning or for physical server and
software capabilities outside the virtual environment.
Although functional for the designed purpose, the user interface is less intuitive than some
competitors.

VMware
VMware is a publicly listed company, headquartered in California, with revenue of more than $5.2
billion in 2013. It employs more than 13,000 people worldwide with vRealize development
performed in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

VMware's capacity management functionality is part of the vRealize Operations suite, which
includes additional ITOM functionality. The capacity management functionality extends coverage of
VMware environments into the wider infrastructure, using management packs that gather and report
capacity metrics. These packs are typically written by partners (e.g., EMC, HP, Brocade and
NetApp) to include storage, networking and other extended capabilities. The product uses the
vRealize Operations console to report capacity shortfalls, opportunities to optimize virtual
infrastructure, and any risks of violating thresholds or policies set for infrastructure segments.

Capacity reports can be customized to show various trending reports for the resources, such as
vCPU, memory and storage. These reports can be scheduled, based on data collected from the
resources being monitored. Scenario-based capacity planning enables infrastructure teams to add
multiple upcoming projects and to understand its impact on future capacity. The console is able to
visualize the overall location of capacity for optimization opportunities. The vRealize Operations
suite has APIs (REST-based) and a software development kit (SDK) to export and import data to
and from other management tools.

VMware sells this product directly and through its partners. It comes in three versions: Standard,
Advanced and Enterprise.

Strengths:

Although vRealize is strongest in the VMware estate, the range of management packs extends
VMware's analytics and automation capabilities to virtual, physical and cloud environments,
including integration of data from other vendors' toolsets.

Gartner, Inc. | G00262546 Page 17 of 21

 VMware has some 20,000 customers and many good relationships with its user base of
infrastructure administrators and managers with capacity management requirements.

Challenges:

VMware relies on its partner ecosystem to extend product functionality via management packs,
for which some vendors may charge fees.
vRealize is less than 12 months old in its current form. Users will need assurance that other
vendors' management packs will remain compatible with all future vRealize releases.

Market Recommendations
1. More mature organizations are generally better at every phase of tool acquisition, including tool
specification, negotiation, implementation, deployment and demonstration of business value.
Good practice is that capacity management as a process discipline should be evident before a
significant investment is made in one or more capacity management tools (see "Govern the
Infrastructure Capacity and Performance Planning Process With These 13 Key Tasks" and
"Well-Defined Duties of the Process Owner and Process Manager Are Critical Success Factors
for Service Improvement Programs").
2. Check the product functionality with your validated service improvement strategy. Avoid
overoptimism. The data from sources such as Gartner's ITScore for Infrastructure and
Operations (ITSIO) shows that, despite years of ITIL training and service improvement initiatives,
more than 80% of IT organizations have yet to achieve a maturity level of 3 (out of five).
Capacity management is not usually in the first wave of processes to be addressed, so
investment in this process and the accompanying tools is lower than it should be in most IT I&O
organizations. Although it is tempting to buy tools with high degrees of functionality, this may
incur expense for features that will be used rarely if at all.
3. For many capacity planners, the user interface and reporting power differentiates the brilliant
tools from the rest. Look at several contenders and get hands-on experience of the tools in all
the modes that you will need to use them (e.g., forecasting, scenario planning, technical and
business reporting).
4. Several of the vendors in this guide are in private ownership. As a result, they don't provide
annual reports in the same way as publicly quoted organizations. Therefore, figures for numbers
of customers and even turnover cannot be completely verified. When considering purchasing
from these vendors, you should conduct due diligence to confirm their suitability as suppliers
and partners for the intended infrastructures.
5. The vendors in this guide have various go-to-market, channel and distribution strategies.
Consequently, their availability and support will vary by geographic location. Before purchase,
check that the required level of support, professional services and training is available in the
locations where you'll need them. Although many services may be delivered remotely or using
Web-based or cloud channels, if you believe you will require on-site support, implementation or
training, then you should verify the availability of these services locally.

Page 18 of 21 Gartner, Inc. | G00262546

 6. Always check the vendor's road map and seek assurances on future functionality. Most users
have a mix of technologies of various generations that require capacity and performance
optimization. Verify that support is offered in all the technologies needed, including those you
expect to deploy in the coming year.
7. Be clear on the segments of the infrastructure that need to be in-scope for your capacity-
planning initiative. For example, if the only areas that need optimization are the virtual servers
and storage areas, this will change the target vendors and cost profiles considerably.
8. Check license and maintenance costs, and seek written assurances on future price increases. It
is common for maintenance fees to increase rapidly after Year 3. Seek an index-linked price
guarantee.

Acronym Key and Glossary Terms

CMIS Capacity Management Information System. The database that holds the capacity related data
including relevant monitoring and reporting information.

DRS VMware's Distributed Resource Scheduler

UI User Interface

LPAR Logical partition of a computer's resources. A term usually applied to mainframes but which is
applicable to any virtual computing platform.

ITOA IT Operational Analytics

P2V Physical to Virtual. Generally applies to server migrations and transformations.

V2VV2C Virtual to Virtual. Generally applies to server migrations and transformations.

Virtual to Cloud

DCIM Data Center Infrastructure Management

Gartner Recommended Reading

Some documents may not be available as part of your current Gartner subscription.

"Market Guide for Open-Source Software Cloud Management Platforms"

"Market Guide for Cloud Management Platforms From Large Software and Emerging Vendors"

"Market Guide for Integrated Infrastructure Systems Cloud Management Platforms"

"Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring"

Gartner, Inc. | G00262546 Page 19 of 21

 "Well-Defined Duties of the Process Owner and Process Manager Are Critical Success Factors for
Service Improvement Programs"

"Govern the Infrastructure Capacity and Performance Planning Process With These 13 Key Tasks"

"Toolkit: Server Performance Monitoring and Capacity Planning Tool RFI"

"Magic Quadrant for Application Performance Monitoring"

"Magic Quadrant for Network Performance Monitoring and Diagnostics"

Evidence
1 Low-capacity management process maturity and tool usage is from extensive analyst inquiries
over the past two years and from ITSIO self-assessment maturity data.

2 All
of the vendors listed in this Market Guide were surveyed by Gartner. Market analysis is based
on more than 100 inquiries on this topic with Gartner clients.

Page 20 of 21 Gartner, Inc. | G00262546

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