Capacity Planning
Capacity planning is a complex, yet crucial part of your datacenter operations. One needs to be sure that, under all circumstances, the infrastructure capacity is capable of handling the actual demand. Without spending more capital (CAPEX) than strictly necessary.
It’s a fact that smart capacity planning can decrease your CAPEX with 50% and even lower your OPEX at the same time. Spending too much money on investments because you can’t afford to be wrong will put you in a bad position towards your competition. Not spending enough might result in a disastrous black-out.
So how can you be sure that you are inside that sweet spot of a balanced CAPEX and OPEX ?
Reliability of DCIM
At Perf-iT we know that the answer to this question lays in the reliability of your DCIM details. When your DCIM data is accurate your DCIM can be very helpful in your day-to-day capacity planning. That’s why Perf-iT has incorporated a multitude of checks and balances in their DCIM solution to assure that every detail matches the actual situation.
How can this help you be more successful? Let us share a real life situation that explains our quest for accuracy and precision in DCIM data:
Floor management
Every floor manager knows that, to secure failover capacity, the sum of feed A and feed B should not exceed the capacity of a single feed to assure fail-over capacity at all times. Also, feed A and feed B should be evenly distributed over the 3 phases of the mains power to assure a balanced load on your power source. However, in practice rack PDUs aren’t always connected to the right outlet or even to the right phase. Due to the almost unavoidable cable clutter in and around the cabinets it happens that 15-25% of all rack PDUs are not attached to the right phase. And in most DCIM tools this will never be revealed. Only at the time when it is too late one realises that the actual failover loads are quite different from the assumptions in the DCIM. Phases might become overloaded despite a proper failover plan. When feed A overloads and feed B can’t handle the extra load complete darkness is the outcome…
Cross reference checking
Perf-iT’s DCIM incorporates cross-reference checking to validate the data. The system calculates the sum of all phase loads of all rack PDUs and compares them to the actual phase loads at the distribution panel or bus bar. When they don’t match something must be wrong (like a PDU connected to the wrong phase) and automatically a flag is raised. You can solve the issue(s) and be assured that your capacity planning does represent the real world situation. Every time a new PDU is connected or something else changes to the infrastructure Perf-iT’s DCIM does a cross reference analysis to make sure the sum of the details match the total amount. This way you can have 100% faith in your capacity or fail-over plan.
