How Capacity Planning has changed

I’d start out with a long-winded "back-in-the-day" story about how we did Capacity Planning back in the mid-1990s (or earlier for many of you), but what's the point?  We're not going backwards.

Virtualization, cloud computing, and other such "fads" are now realities of how we do IT.  So, does that mean Capacity Planning as we knew it is no longer relevant?

Not. At. All.

It's just changed now.  Not always for the better and not always for the worse, either.  It depends on your perspective.

If you are a CIO and have decided to outsource much of your IT to a well-known outsourcer who is expert at running others' IT operations, you've essentially decided to push the Capacity Planning function on to those who are providing your IT.  Yes, you will agree to service level agreements.  Yes, the outsourcer will provide you (possibly) with reports showing how much capacity is available in the environment you're paying for.  But the responsibility to provide adequate capacity at an acceptable cost while still meeting service level agreements is now on the shoulders of the outsourcer.  And, based on my experience in working with a few outsourcing companies, they take this responsibility seriously,.  They take it even more seriously if they are ISO2000 compliant, since Capacity Management is a requirement for that certification.

Consider a light switch in your house.  When you turn on the light switch, you’re not concerned in the least bit about the capacity or the health of the electric grid.  You just want the light to come on -- at the cost you've agreed to pay.  The electricity provider is the one that must be concerned with all the details behind getting the electricity to your house or office.  That utility model is useful when thinking about outsourcing or even when talking about working with cloud providers.  

Going back to the example in the previous blog: If you spent the last 20 years worrying about whether looping processes existed on your Unix box, it can be unnerving to say, "That's not my problem. I don't care." But in this new model, the only details the business should be concerned with are the following:

(1) How much does it cost and are we happy paying that cost?

(2) Is the provider meeting our service level agreements?

Of course, not everyone is completely outsourced, nor has everything been pushed to cloud providers.  So next time, we'll look at the role of the Capacity Manager today and then look at why we need to spend more time on the transaction in order to be able to develop better service level agreements and create better business/IT alignment.

Rich Fronheiser

VP, Strategic marketing