So as always...
Quickly
Cheaply
Properly.
Choose 2 out of the 3.
Capacity planning in an age of agile and on - demand IT
Have we all been caught asleep at the capacity planning wheel? Business users today want, and expect new IT services to be delivered in the blink of an eye, the necessary resources provisioned instantly, and changes made “on demand”. But such IT flexibility requires that physical resources, server, storage and networking are …
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Tuesday 12th July 2016 09:01 GMT Anonymous Coward
It isn't only IT
Having spent a good proportion of my career in network planning and operations I can say that these problems apply there as well.
In my experience the life cycle goes something like this.
1. Strategy, The Business strategy types produce a high level forward look at where the business is going and how this translates into network demand. The strategy looks forward several years and is revised at least once a year. People in Strategy roles make sure they are never moved down the lifecycle to pick up the pieces.
2. Network Forecasting and Planning. NFP takes the strategy and compares it to real life and therefore largely ignores it. We were pretty good at forecasting last year's demands but it gets a bit flaky after that. Nonetheless the overall level of capacity is roughly right and equated to current capacity plus GDP growth in the technology sector. Location and deployment accuracy was less good and we totally missed new and emerging (i.e non-traditional) demands.
3. Purchase. Capacity requirements were translated into hardware and software purchases. The suppliers told us what we could have.
4. Delivery and operations. The systems that were ordered based on last years strategy and a good guess by planning were delivered to Operations who put it where they thought it was needed based on their network congestion data.
Gin and Tonics all round.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
