These days I talked with one vendor about his news around capacity management. Capacity management is used as a term to describe products which are used for optimizing workloads in data centers and to make the best use of the resources within these data centers. Honestly, I didn't do a deep dive into that specific area before, and maybe I'm a green on advanced IT topics - but when vendors are promising capacity management, I'd expect that to be somewhat active. However, I've learned that it's about reporting and analytics - even in association with terms like dynamic, continuous, proactive or whatever. I've checked several other offerings in the meantime and it appears to be common understanding amongst these vendors, that management ends with some nice reports in the space of capacity management.
I would have used the terms capacity reporting or capacity analytics instead, but I know that vendor marketing tends to "beautify" their stories a little.
So what are my expectations on capacity management? The issue is obvious - it is complex to manage the workloads in the increasingly virtualized and complex data centers. And it is becoming even more complex when we have different "clouds", private and public, where we might put these workloads. Thus we need to support that we can optimize this - a dynamic or continuous capacity management is key. However, I'd at least expect to have a little more than just the information that there is something to be optimized. To achieve a fully automated management for sure will be a long journey, requiring a strong and valid policy model to ensure that nothing goes wrong. It will also require a tight integration with Business Service Management to ensure that the specifics of business processes like high workloads at the end of the month/year are met. It will even require that financial aspects (costs of internal and external cloud resources) and governance aspects (which data and workloads is allowed to be placed where due to governance/compliance/security constraints?) are met. In the meantime, automatically created "jobs" for the virtualization, server, and application management tools to easily make the proposed changes reality would be a first step.
I'm looking forward to see when capacity management becomes reality. There is definitely a value in today's solutions. But the value could me significantly bigger than it is.