A storage placement planning system receives a resource graph describing SAN's resources and virtual machine applications requiring a particular amount of a processing resource element and a storage resource element. The system then determines a coupled placement of the processing element and storage element for each of the applications on a coupled pair of the resource nodes based on a specified throughput and a distance factor between coupled pairs of resource nodes. The coupled placement is determined using an algorithm that implements a cost function that determines affinities between processing nodes and storage nodes for each of said applications of a particular workload. The coupled placement for each of said applications identifies the particular amount of processing resource element placed on a first node for providing a processing resource and the particular amount of storage resource element placed on a second node for providing a storage resource for that application.