Cloud takes capacity management backwards

Grazed from ITWeb. Author: Tracey Burrows.

IT capacity management maturity has taken several steps backwards, thanks to the arrival of virtualisation and cloud computing. So says Paul Diepenbroek, practice manager, consulting services and operations management, at Dimension Data.

Diepenbroek says capacity management, which by 2009 was relatively mature, has lost a great deal of ground, because the toolsets that were adequate three years ago no longer suit the needs of business and IT today.

“Capacity management – ensuring that the IT infrastructure and services have the capacity to accommodate business demands now and into the future – is becoming increasingly important,” he says. Where some years ago, an IT failure was an inconvenience to business, now business relies so heavily on its IT that a systems failure or lack of capacity has potential impacts on service operations, which lead to revenue loss.”…

This means there’s a greater need for alignment between IT and business.

The situation was well in hand until a few years ago, he says, with many IT departments showing good maturity in terms of their ability to both determine “what they have, where it is, what its availability is and how it is performing”, and to assess current capacity and future needs.

But virtualisation and cloud computing have changed the landscape, says Diepenbroek. Now, business wants its computing as a utility model, and the CIO is more concerned with managing service agreements.

“In some respects, the cloud has made capacity management more complex,” says Diepenbroek. “With pure cloud computing, control of the infrastructure may not be in the hands of IT, it may sit with a service provider. The anxiety this causes is that capacity may depend on an SLA with a third-party service provider. So it depends on the maturity of that service provider whether the CIO will have sleepless nights or not.”

Even in a controlled, virtualised environment, capacity management is changing.

Diepenbroek says: “The tools one needs to manage performance and capacity in a virtualised environment must change. The toolsets that existed for capacity management don’t adequately provide for the first part of the cloud journey, which is virtualisation.

“Fortunately, the providers of these tools saw it coming and have brought to market tools to manage this effectively.”