Capacity Management - 2008

I am curious about this thing called Capacity Management.  Sure, a few years ago, a lot of people had jobs related to it and even now, some people are doing it.  But, it has always been a Mainframe thing to me.  There are words that stick in my mind like DASD and MIPS.  Let's think about this.  How many people out there know what Edlin was.  No hints like I gave to the 20 something Windows guru's at work.  I feel old.  Its probably because I am pushing middle age and have a sports car.  My birthday is next Sunday.  I am part of the pre gen X gen if there is such a phrase.  We are called baby boomers because after World War 2, a lot of people migrated from Europe and found jobs and had kids.

Anyway, enough of a senile IT person's ranting, lets focus on Capacity Management again.  Mainframes still cost a considerable amount of money and they serve a purpose.  But has anyone ever made sense of trying to do fortune telling with Midrange systems.  Oddly enough, if anything needs control, its Midrange.  I have built some absolute monster systems that make mainframe look like those wierd Java rings of the late 1990's.   They had 1 MIP processors and no storage that I knew of.  I was instrumental in building a 500 TB (yep TB not GB) system a while ago.  So how can anyone really consider capacity management in open systems in 2008?  It doesn't exist.  Its all about build a server, give me 5 TB and have it done by Monday next week.  I am unable to do any capacity management of storage but I do like the rule of:

What do we have this year?  Next year, we need double that and the following year, double that again.   But where does FC and SATA come into that?  Two years ago, I had say 150 TB.  This year, umm.. without the special system, 400 TB.  I have junk 250 and 500 GB SATA, 146 and 300 GB FC.  10k and 15k FC disk.  RAID 1, 5, 6 and 10.  Add my disk staging (D2D2T - and in some circumstances, D2D2D2T because of a problem with backups) solutions, backup and archiving solutions.  Throw in another 100 TB for fun, etc..  I could strangle the person who came up with tiered storage or ILM.  Fantastic concept but just another sales pitch hoping that we buy more storage.

I had to format my mp4 player to be able to show DIVX and MP4 movies on my PS3 as it only uses FAT32.  I was able to cope with that as I copied my 100 GB disk to my backup device at home (I have 1.4 TB of SATA on my desk at home) and now I can watch AVCHD home movies (roughly 30 MB per second) on my new LCD TV.....

Do I have to consider creating a position of capacity manager for non Mainframe storage for my home let alone my workplace?

I'm confused.  Anyone care to expand on that?

Stephen