In listening to eBay’s Mazen Rawashdeh and Gartner’s Dave Cappuccio in their Gartner Data Center Conference session discussing how eBay solved their infrastructure and data center challenges, a few things stood out to me:

• A linear relationship between capacity and cost is not a sustainable IT Operations model. If you cannot look at historical data, understand your current capacity status, and be able to plan for future capacity investments, you will have a tough time keeping your costs at a reasonable rate while providing adequate capacity to support all of the services you provide to the business.
• Metrics drive behavior. Think about it…accountability cannot happen without measurement.
• If you are unable to innovate and keep up with the changes around you, you will fail. This is not only good business but also a valuable life lesson.
• Start with the why, not the what. Help your teams understand WHY they are doing what they are doing.
• People, process, and tools are the foundation for driving change, efficiency, and ultimately generating revenue.

So, what’s your plan to break the linear correlation between capacity and cost?

Joe

Well, I finally heard the word that I’ve known to be true in pretty much every emerging data center technology that has come about in the past 20 years of TeamQuest’s existence. “Sprawl.” But now it’s turned from “virtual sprawl” to “cloud sprawl.” In sitting in one of the key notes yesterday, I heard Gartner’s Ray Paquet enunciate the words that make my skin crawl. Sprawl!

The only cure for technology sprawl are the fundamentals of our IT Service Optimization (or ITSO, hence the name of this blog) process. A combination of capacity management people, process, and tools is the cure. With the advent of recent technology like virtualization and cloud computing, people thought capacity would not be a problem. But, the fact remains that data center space along with power and cooling is still one of the top priorities of CIOs across the globe. Yet people thought capacity management was dead, right? Wrong.

If you’d like to keep up with the rest of the Gartner Data Center Conference, you can follow the #GartnerDC hashtag, follow me at @jwia on Twitter, or keep checking this blog for updates. Oh, and you can always join our LinkedIn Group.

All for now,

Joe