Things that will make capacity management harder to do…

Some challenges inevitably get thrown in the path of the Capacity Manager as he tries to do his job.  While challenges are just that - challenging and thus not easy to overcome, not everything thrown in the path of the capacity manager is a valid issue.

‘We’re too dynamic’

Both within IT infrastructure and outside, there seems to be delight in saying that things change too quickly to make the predictive aspects of capacity management feasible.  Perhaps this goes with the fire hose issues in my previous blog. 

If you feel you are the hunky hero striding in to put out the fire and carry the rest of the organization to safety, being told that the fires can be avoided or minimized might not be what you want to hear. 

Certainly with virtualization and other trends, we can provision and change IT resources faster than ever before. 

That also means we can waste resources and money faster than ever before as well of course, if we don’t put the effort in to understand what really will be needed and when.

‘But cheap hardware keeps getting even cheaper’

As above, it’s then easier to waste money faster. 

Gartner has been warning of ‘virtual server sprawl’ replacing server sprawl for several years now. 

If your host utilizations are less than 30%, you’ve got money you can save by using resources better.

Under-provisioning and using the Cloud is often touted as the way to avoid this virtual server sprawl. 

Of course, Cloud resources are like your bank overdraft – nice to know they’re there but expensive if you have to call on them. 

There will always be a premium price on resources provisioned from a third party at short notice (whether that third party is internal or external) and letting the capacity manager plan what is really needed within sensible limits of flexibility will always prove more cost effective.

‘We’ve consolidated suppliers and our key partners look after us’

This logic has moved through the outsourcing boom to Cloud providers, including having a single key hardware provider. 

It all still comes down to asking the fox to look after the chickens. 

From the provider’s perspective, there is less risk in selling ‘safe’ (over-provisioned) services in advance than in selling a cheaper service and maintaining a client relationship characterized by service quality problems if under-provisioned. 

Service penalties are not really an answer: I just got $50 back from a car rental firm for supplying a faulty GPS in a car.  Nice, but I still lost an hour of my life navigating out of and back to Logan airport in Boston to get the car changed. 

A key thing to remember, especially with Cloud, is where the responsibility for getting your sizing correct lies.  Unless you’re buying full Software as a Service, it is down to you to buy the right resources from your provider, not for them to know your business and define for you what you will need. 

It’s more critical than ever in a Cloud world that capacity managers get the opportunity and the support to define what resources are required, to avoid those nasty premiums that go with that wonderful elasticity of resource provision.

‘We don’t know what's going to happen’

Often when the capacity manager talks to users, they claim it is impossible to predict in their world. 

How much the business will grow, when new initiatives will take affect are all business drivers that they cannot control.  When they do take effect however, those managing the IT infrastructure are supposed to support them at a cost defined before the changes occur. 

This is where capacity management needs to be implemented with high level management support within the business. 

It also needs to be set up as a regular, iterative part of the business process. 

Demand becomes clearer over time, so regular interaction between capacity management and business leads to an ever-better refined picture of needs. 

This also allows capacity management to feed back early the broad implications of initial guesstimates’ by the business of what they might be planning. 

This can rule out gross errors at an early stage and help the business refine its own understanding of what they might need. 

As mentioned earlier in this blog series, this is a sensitive and skilled area of capacity management that might benefit from external consulting from experts such as Metron, to take the heat out of that IT-business relationship.

‘No one understands me’

The capacity manager can of course be part of his own problem.  If no one understands you, the problem is yours not theirs. 

Capacity managers need to be able to talk with their varied audience (IT infrastructure; application/service owners/business).  It's the capacity manager’s job to do this in terms that that particular audience can understand.  This is an area where external consulting support can help educate capacity managers and set up a viable capacity management process. 

While the capacity management role technically has become less esoteric than it was 20 years ago, the need to liaise with business has become stronger.  This requires just as much skill as understanding the inner workings of analytical models, but capacity managers need to evolve and understand that it's a different set of skills.

Enough about challenge, let’s have some thoughts about how these challenges can be overcome.  Not now though, that will be the topic of my next blog.

If you’d like more thoughts on capacity management  feel free to browse and download white papers on capacity management by joining our Metron community

http://www.metron-athene.com/_downloads/_published_papers/index.html

Andrew Smith

Chief Sales & Marketing Officer