IT is an integral part of the business fabric and is fast reaching a utility status in the enterprise.
Increasingly lower hardware costs have opened the door to a multitude of applications and have mistakenly made some IT processes, such as the capacity management of infrastructure resources, seem obsolete. This study will show that capacity management and predictive analysis are not just about hardware costs, but about service quality and the optimization of personnel resources, a budget post that is actually increasing in all IT organizations.
The key IT management drivers now revolve around quality of service and cost control. Improving the business workforce productivity through quality of service and improving IT efficiency by maintaining service quality while reducing costs are the main directions that are mentioned by the IT decision-makers surveyed in this report.
A majority see consolidation of infrastructures using virtualization as a way to reduce IT
infrastructure and energy costs. Better reactive and predictive approaches to service performance issues are seen as the best ways to maintain service quality.
However, these two worlds collide; virtualization is often times affecting service performances in a
way that is difficult to resolve in production, as many monitoring tools do not provide enough visibility into the application container. A majority of IT decision-makers surveyed consider that predictive analysis of the application workloads that are candidates for virtualization, as well as the predictive sizing of the physical infrastructure that will support the virtual elements, are the mosteffective ways to avoid problems in production.
In fact, the results of this study show that, given the difficulties of resolving issues in production and the potential impact on the business workforce, capacity management processes and tools are the best ways to control both service levels and costs at the IT level and reduce the productivity and financial impact of problems at the business level.