The Problems And Solutions Of Capacity Planning

RJ Tee
July 20, 2016

the-problems-and-solutions-of-capacity-planning - https://cdn.buttercms.com/iGGZuskTcqubpjzFQvmU

It’s never fun to lose sleep over a problem, but night after night, many of us toss and turn, worrying about the things both within our control and beyond it. For the folks who run data centers, it’s no different.

We’ve identified some of the key issues that keep data center managers and IT teams up at night:

  • Where is the power needed to support the installation of additional hardware?
  • How can I minimize total power consumption?
  • How can I use the least amount of energy and still get the most computation?
  • How will I be notified when problems occur and, more importantly, how can we automate as much of the corrective response as possible?
  • How do we accommodate for daily and seasonal utilization surges?
  • Do we have enough power to support failover conditions through power path redundancy?
  • Which software tools will best help me predict when and where problems are going to occur?

Proper capacity planning, which you can read about in this white paper,  ensures you have enough power to accommodate the average workload, while also allowing for sufficient headroom to meet peak demands. The best tools are the ones that give data center managers the ability to quickly identify where power is available. This is crucial to supporting changing hardware deployment and changing workload.

To contend with these issues, IT needs to know the as-configured potential demand, the current actual demand, the as-configured potential supply and the current actual supply. Easier said than done, right?

Ultimately, in order to properly perform capacity planning, you should:

  • Determine your Service Level Agreements
  • Analyze current capacity
  • Plan for the future
It’s Time to Declare War on Data Center Power Inefficiency