"The data center is getting bigger and more complex and so too is the asset inventory. Every new asset has an impact on the day–to–day operations of the data center – from power consumption and problem resolution to capacity planning and change management. To achieve – and maintain – operational excellence, organizations don’t just need to know the location of their data center assets, they need to know if they are over-heating, under–performing or sitting idle."

Effective capacity management has become a critical differentiator for IT organizations. Those that can’t effectively evolve their capacity management practice will continue to struggle with complexity and negligible insights into capacity sizing and the impact of changing demand and resulting service/application performance. However, those that gain advanced capacity management capabilities will be able to more effectively right-size investments, support key IT projects, and align resources with business objectives. This paper offers a practical look at capacity management, outlining the six key steps IT organizations can take to realize capacity management that delivers maximum value.

Facebook is aiming to bring together data from IT, facilities and application development operations to facilitate workflow management and automation for greater operational efficiency of its datacenters. To that end, the company is developing an atypically extensive datacenter management software platform, which it has begun to deploy in some of its facilities. Facebook's datacenter infrastructure management (DCIM) system is 'hybrid' in that it includes both homegrown and commercial components.