Recently, I spent an evening talking about the current and future view of Capacity Management with an old friend over a few pints of beer. I know, I know, normal people talk about sports and their kids, but we got down this train of discussion and there was no turning back, at least until the pint needed refilling. Before we get to the conversation in a future installment, let's set some background....
Back in *my* old days (about 15 years ago) when I first got involved in what we called "Capacity Planning and Performance Analysis" we simply captured data from systems and made sure that we had enough CPU and memory headroom and that the disks were performing as expected and that we weren't going to run out of disk space.
The cloud is the game changer, in my opinion. Recently, I was speaking to someone who I respect greatly who lamented that we need to be able to see anomalies on systems that are running in "the cloud" in order to do our jobs. And it was at that moment that I realized that the old-school mind set of capturing resource utilization data was simply not enough (or in some cases not even possible) and that our ways of thinking must change.
So, what does that epiphany do for the capacity manager and the vendors who are trying to sell Capacity Management products and services?
What we used to call Capacity Management just five years ago isn't quite the same today, at least not from the perspective of many of our clients and prospects. While hosting a training session this morning, I noticed that about half the attendees mentioned that their companies are considering or have already implemented a cloud strategy. And, to me, the cloud changes the game for Capacity Management entirely.
Back in *my* old days (about 15 years ago) when I first got involved in what we called "Capacity Planning and Performance Analysis" we simply captured data from systems and made sure that we had enough CPU and memory headroom and that the disks were performing as expected and that we weren't going to run out of disk space.
Then came client-server computing....
Then came complex suites of applications and middleware...
Then came the advent of virtualization followed by the mainstreaming and proliferation of virtualization....
The world of the capacity manager became more complex, but we still were able to look at all of the resource level data and we were still able to manage the infrastructure in order to provide the right amount of capacity at the right time.
Then came complex suites of applications and middleware...
Then came the advent of virtualization followed by the mainstreaming and proliferation of virtualization....
The world of the capacity manager became more complex, but we still were able to look at all of the resource level data and we were still able to manage the infrastructure in order to provide the right amount of capacity at the right time.
The cloud is the game changer, in my opinion. Recently, I was speaking to someone who I respect greatly who lamented that we need to be able to see anomalies on systems that are running in "the cloud" in order to do our jobs. And it was at that moment that I realized that the old-school mind set of capturing resource utilization data was simply not enough (or in some cases not even possible) and that our ways of thinking must change.
So, what does that epiphany do for the capacity manager and the vendors who are trying to sell Capacity Management products and services?
I'll cover this in more depth in future blogs -- looking at Capacity Planning, Performance Management, the role of today's Capacity Manager, and how the traditional view of Resource/Component Capacity Management fits with today's necessary focus on the transaction and on the End User Experience.
Rich Fronheiser
VP, Strategic Marketing
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