Yonas Tibebu

  What is data center capacity planning, simply explained? Data center capacity planning is the establishment of a strategy that ensures an IT organization's computing resources, power load, footprint and cooling capacity will be able to meet the workload demands of its users and customers. Why is capacity planning important? Data centers are limited in terms of footprint, power consumption and cooling capacity. While redundant backup power and fault-tolerant server clusters can potentially increase uptime, they can also reduce the total available power capacity.  Planning too much capacity for the given workloads wastes capital expenditures and might draw power to idle, unused servers. Over-provisioning computer room air conditioners also results in below optimal efficiency operation. Under-planning capacity is also a big problem, because it can debilitate business operations. Without adequate power and cooling for the data center's workload, out...

  Load balancing is a technique used to distribute workloads uniformly across servers or other compute resources to optimize network efficiency, reliability and capacity.   Load balancing is performed by an appliance -- either physical or virtual -- that identifies in real time which server in a pool can best meet a given client request, while ensuring heavy network traffic doesn't unduly overwhelm a single server. In addition to maximizing network capacity and performance, load balancing provides failover. If one server fails, a load balancer immediately redirects its workloads to a backup server, thus mitigating the impact on end users. Load balancing is usually categorized as supporting either Layer 4 or Layer 7. Layer 4 load balancers distribute traffic based on transport data, such as IP addresses and Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) port numbers. Layer 7 load-balancing devices make routing decisions based on application-level characteristics that include HTTP ...

  A canary is a code release that is tested in a post-production environment by a small subset of end users. Canaries may also be referred to as canary tests or yellow deployments. Canary tests, which are usually automated, are run after testing in a sandbox environment has been completed. Like the canary in a coal mine, the end user who is selected to receive new code in a canary test is unaware he or she is being used to provide an early warning. Canary tests help software developers uncover new, unexpected scenarios that may not have been detected within the development environment. Because a canary is only distributed to a small number of people, its impact is relatively small and changes can be reversed quickly if code changes slow performance or cause an application to crash. In software testing, a canary is a push of programming code changes to a small group of end users who are unaware that they are receiving new code. Because the canary is on...