Capacity planning of network and systems resources is an essential activity that can be used to mitigate against arguably the single most common network and application performance killer, the bottleneck.   A lack of bandwidth, processor cycles, load balancer sessions, HDD space, the list goes on, either as a fundamental permanent issue, or more unpredictably at certain peak performance times, will directly affect business applications and the efficacy of the user base.  Identifying and dealing with capacity before it becomes a demonstrable problem is fundamental to providing always on, high quality user-experience applications and infrastructure.  IT Capacity planning, however, is not simply about identifying current and potential bottlenecks and spending money on upgrades, but also identifying how your IT estate can work smarter and at full potential so that issues can often be addressed by re-using and redeploying existing infrastructure in different or enhanced ways..