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....
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 we 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 mindset 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?
More on Monday……………
Rich Fronheiser
Chief Marketing Officer
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