Capacity planning
When we take our knowledge of system resource usage away from the being in the moment and begin to apply it over the long-term aspects of a system, we start to think about capacity planning. Capacity planning should be, at least in theory, a rather important aspect of system administration. Many organizations will treat capacity planning as a non-technical exercise, however, and take it out of system administration hands. It is amazing how often I am told by a system administrator that they have received hardware that they did not specify and now have to make it work even though it was designed by someone with no knowledge of how it would be used! So much training and knowledge of system design in system administration being ignored and critical purchasing being down with no rhyme or reason.
It Is already designed when purchased
One of the strangest problems that I run into with great regularity is system administrators asking me how they should set up hardware...