Data Center Infrastructure Management, or DCIM, has become top-of-mind these days, and for good reason. There are a number of important trends out there fueling DCIM  market growth, including data center consolidation, the move toward virtualization and cloud computing, the need to accelerate service delivery growth, and the desire to reduce power consumption costs.

In my recent conversations with enterprise CIOs, it’s become clear that one of their major business initiatives is data center capacity planning.  Why? Because every single CIO out there is being asked find additional compute cycles, get more I/O to the discs, and support ever more network traffic. And, they’re being asked to do all of that operating with the same — and oftentimes a reduced — budget. 

The only way to accomplish is through intelligent data center capacity planning, and to do that planning, CIOs: 1) need to know what’s in their entire IT stack; and 2) need access to sophisticated predictive analytics tools that let them model and assess all of their viable options for gaining better business leverage out of current or planned data center infrastructure. 

This topic is near and dear to my heart, so you’ll definitely be hearing more on data center capacity planning and data center analytics from me in the coming months. We are at the beginning of what is going to be a very interesting ride.