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In today's world, it is vital to align IT with business goals. On the business side, there are typically demands to add more users, give those users greater levels of access, and deliver new or better services. The business also requests that applications scale up from smaller environments to enterprise-wide deployments, and that those applications are brought to market at a rapid pace.

Those needs have to be married up, however, with the realities of the situation. As the user population and utilization rates increase, power/cooling costs escalate, and floor space becomes constrained.

Be prepared for business changes
The picture is further complicated by the emergence of new business models that must be accommodated. For example, more and more companies are adopting an advertising model for service delivery. The internet, in particular, facilitates this approach. The "freemium" model is also gaining in popularity (i.e. offering free services to attract a large following and then offering premium services to those members which, in effect, pay for all the free services). The point is that IT must be flexible enough to adjust to the evolving commercial climate.

As the business paradigms have adjusted over the years, so too have the underlying principles behind IT. We began many decades ago with the centralized era. Mainframes provided a highly disciplined, efficient but somewhat inflexible structure. Those days gave way to a more distributed approach based on a client/server infrastructure. This addressed the flexibility issue but it also introduced inefficiencies which largely remain with us to this day.

In the last couple of years we have seen a whole new way of looking at IT - virtualization. Yet it really isn't that new. In fact, it harkens back to the mainframe days and has yet to reach the level of maturity on open systems as it has already achieved on the mainframe. For example, it is largely true that the benefits of virtualization to date have mainly been enjoyed in terms of solving issues with misbehaving applications. Instead of having multiple applications on one server that compete for system resources, each application can now be given its own virtual machine (VM).

What's old is new again
So where are we heading next? In all likelihood, we are going full circle. The "mainframe" (i.e. high performance, centralized computing) is making a distinct comeback, though in a way that is far more flexible than before. This new mode of mainframe is benefiting from the discipline inherent in ITIL. Such best practice frameworks will set the stage for wider enterprise deployments of centralized computing methodologies. This transformation will be facilitated by virtualization technologies.

Virtualization provides dynamic relationships between virtual resources, physical assets, business processes and IT services. As such, it enables rapid deployment, rapid change and rapid response. Maintenance windows, perhaps, can be dispensed with permanently, and tasks such as backup/recovery, provisioning and instrumentation will be greatly simplified.

For virtualization to realize its promise, though, we require additional management tools to provide the desired levels of automation. But there is no need to wait as capacity planning tools like TeamQuest already possess the maturity to chart the right course towards a virtualized tomorrow.

It would be nice to think that VMs will be deployed in an orderly way. But the reality is that VM sprawl is already taking place. The likelihood is that chaos will reign unless Capacity Management becomes an integral part of IT.