You can put some business tasks on the back burner without suffering any repercussions. However, some tasks you don’t want to ignore like data center planning capacity. The success of your business often depends on its ability to quickly and securely scale its IT resources.
If the capacity is inaccurate, your IT resources aren’t being used efficiently. You may even experience some downtime, which can fundamentally impact everything in your organization from your services to customer satisfaction. We’ll take a look at data center capacity planning considerations so your business runs smoothly.
Steps for Planning Data Center Capacity
Trying to accurately plan your data center capacity can be challenging. You’re not only planning for a day or week but often for the month and possibly even an entire season.
Since things can change in real-time, you need to create a flexible plan that can adjust to your business needs. This requires advanced calculations to ensure your applications and services are always running smoothly. So, how do you create an effective data center capacity plan? Here’s a look at the best practices.
Use Accurate Asset Data
Your asset data is crucial for data center capacity planning. Your asset data will include information on precise cabinet locations, the types of connectors, and the number of power/data ports.
If this information isn’t accurate it will throw off every aspect of your plan and can also cause issues with things like change requests and reservations.
Employ What-If Scenarios
Before you make any changes, it’s a good idea to run some what-if scenarios—so this way, you have a good idea of the data center’s existing capacity before committing to new projects. The last thing you want is to start a project only to learn your data center’s capacity can’t handle the workload.
Use simulations to see what happens if you make changes to your data center. For example, what happens if you move a component like a server or add another central processing unit (CPU)? The results of the scenarios can help determine if your data center has the necessary capacity or if it needs to increase.
Learn About Rack Unit Fragmentation
Are you considering installing additional rack units? If so, space capacity can be a concern. Before you start adding assets, figure out how many items can be employed at your location. For example, is height a concern? You can only stack components so high.
Is your space fragmented into smaller Rus (rack units)? If so, you may want to consider transitioning to larger RUs. While installing larger rack units may seem counterintuitive when you’re trying to free up space, the opposite is true. Larger rack units can eliminate fragmentation which can give your data center more available room.
Monitory Your Port, Cooling, and Power Capacity
Even though space is a concern, so is your data center’s ability to connect, power, and cool the equipment. Monitoring these metrics is doable, but it’s significantly easier when you use software.
A software application can let you know the data center’s precise power and cooling capacity, along with the number of available and connected ports. With this information, you have a better idea of what your data center can handle without slowing down other services.
Creating an Effective Data Center Capacity Plan
Some data center managers try to create plans that last up to ten years. However, this is usually a mistake. What your business needs for its data center can change daily and an inflexible, long-term plan doesn’t always produce the best results.
A more effective approach to data center capacity planning allows for changes. To help you get started on an effective data center capacity plan, here are a few steps you may want to follow:
- Figure out what resources are necessary to support the installation of new equipment, which will include measuring rack space and power. You’ll also look at UPS and panel power. Don’t forget about your cooling capacity and available port connectivity, which can include your fiber and data ports. With this information, you know precisely what you can deploy without affecting other data center tasks.
- Do you have unused capacity? Most data centers aren’t fully using all of the capacity currently available, which can include available space, connections, and power. If you find unused capacity, leverage this first before deploying additional components. This is also an effective way of reducing redundancy in data centers and keeping operational costs down.
- Double-check your capacity planning calculations before making any changes, which includes adding new components or decommissioning old ones. Hopefully, you’re using software to calculate your data center capacity, which will help ensure the data is accurate. If you’re wondering why inaccurate data can be a problem, it can lead to downtimes and data center inefficiency. For example, you may think you have unused capacity on a server when, in reality, the storage space is filled.
After going through all of your calculations, it’s finally time to start creating a data center capacity plan. Your plan should account for the components’ weight, size, power usage rates, and usage trends.
Sometimes, it helps to plan capacity by groups, which can include grouping components by function or department. The goal is to simplify the plan as much as possible; you don’t want your data center capacity plan to create confusion with your IT department.
Once your plan is ready, make sure to share it with all relevant parties, which typically includes your IT staff, along with other stakeholders. Now, you’re finally on to the easy part. It’s time to create work orders to install any new equipment.
If you’re adding new components to your current setup, make sure you reserve space, power, port, and cooling capacities.
Don’t Put Off Data Center Capacity Planning
Your data center is a vital part of your business, and you want to keep it running efficiently and effectively, which means capacity planning, and it can be challenging. After all, there are a lot of different things to measure and calculate—the process can also be time-consuming.
However, ignoring capacity planning can adversely affect everything from your business’s ability to provide its services to customer satisfaction.