I&O's New Capacity Planning Organization

The precipitous and predictable drops in IT hardware unit-costs during the past 20 years made capacity planning obsolete. It was cheaper to overprovision than to hire experts. But infrastructure utilization and operational efficiency are again priorities, albeit for different reasons. The need to optimize data center logistics and the cost of infrastructure administration means that infrastructure and operations (I&O) teams are now trying to squeeze the last drop of processing through the latest optimization techniques of virtualization and different forms of cloud computing. But using these techniques requires you to refocus on planning and forecasting. Capacity planning tool vendors have quickly adapted their products, but unfortunately, many IT operations have forgotten the art of capacity management and planning. I&O teams will need to reorganize their staff by taking a twofold strategy. First, decentralize capacity management and place it in the respective technology support groups, like network, server, and storage. Second, centralize capacity planning with a corporate IT function that reports directly to the CIO.