Skip to main content

Data center capacity planning

 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, outages are more common. Without enough computing, network and storage capacity, applications encounter bottlenecks and potentially stop working or take too long to ramp up new applications.

How does capacity planning work?

IT organizations should start capacity planning with agreed-upon service performance metrics, such as storing data for X amount of days, and running applications with a response time of X. To be effective, the capacity planning process requires sophisticated load calculations both at normal and peak performance times. To determine optimal capacity, IT organizations can benchmark operations with either simulated or real load testing, trend analysis or modeling using tools designed for this purpose.

Capacity planning software tools can help the administrator calculate the resources and power draw that a data center must support, given current and projected future operations. Such tools range from simple spreadsheets to 3D renderings of the data center with automated asset discovery and documentation. Some sophisticated capacity management tools will even suggest outsourcing options when major power, space and cooling upgrades to the physical site are cost or time prohibitive.

Virtualization, which allows data center managers to consolidate servers by stacking multiple workloads onto one physical server and powering off others, should also be considered in data center capacity planning. With virtualization and cloud computing, companies can plan for more flexible capacity that scales up and down without one-to-one investments in power or IT systems. For example, the retail organization can scale up on hosted cloud servers in Q4, keeping its data center build appropriate to normal demand. To handle a temporary spike in transactions during a large sale, the retailer can increase server utilization via virtualization. This requires applications to be designed for agility across platforms and management tools that can oversee multiple infrastructures.

Who is responsible for data center capacity planning?

It is usually the data center manager or IT director's responsibility to chart a capacity plan and determine what strategy will accommodate business needs best. IT service management frameworks like ITIL provide the planner with detailed recommendations for capacity management.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Black swan

A  black swan event  is an incident that occurs randomly and unexpectedly and has wide-spread ramifications. The event is usually followed with reflection and a flawed rationalization that it was inevitable. The phrase illustrates the frailty of inductive reasoning and the danger of making sweeping generalizations from limited observations. The term came from the idea that if a man saw a thousand swans and they were all white, he might logically conclude that all swans are white. The flaw in his logic is that even when the premises are true, the conclusion can still be false. In other words, just because the man has never seen a black swan, it does not mean they do not exist. As Dutch explorers discovered in 1697, black swans are simply outliers -- rare birds, unknown to Europeans until Willem de Vlamingh and his crew visited Australia. Statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb uses the phrase black swan as a metaphor for how humans deal with unpredictable events in his 2007...
Post a Comment
Read more

A Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)

A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a computer chip that performs rapid mathematical calculations, primarily for the purpose of rendering images. A GPU may be found integrated with a central processing unit (CPU) on the same circuit, on a graphics card or in the motherboard of a personal computer or server. In the early days of computing, the CPU performed these calculations. As more graphics-intensive applications such as AutoCAD were developed; however, their demands put strain on the CPU and degraded performance. GPUs came about as a way to offload those tasks from CPUs, freeing up their processing power. NVIDIA, AMD, Intel and ARM are some of the major players in the GPU market. GPU vs. CPU A graphics processing unit is able to render images more quickly than a central processing unit because of its parallel processing architecture, which allows it to perform multiple calculations at the same time. A single CPU does not have this capability, although multi...
Post a Comment
Read more

6G (sixth-generation wireless)

6G (sixth-generation wireless) is the successor to 5G cellular technology. 6G networks will be able to use higher frequencies than 5G networks and provide substantially higher capacity and much lower latency. One of the goals of the 6G Internet will be to support one micro-second latency communications, representing 1,000 times faster -- or 1/1000th the latency -- than one millisecond throughput. The 6G technology market is expected to facilitate large improvements in the areas of imaging, presence technology and location awareness. Working in conjunction with AI, the computational infrastructure of 6G will be able to autonomously determine the best location for computing to occur; this includes decisions about data storage, processing and sharing.  Advantages of 6G over 5G 6G is expected to support 1 terabyte per second (Tbps) speeds. This level of capacity and latency will be unprecedented and wi...
Post a Comment
Read more