Network Capacity Planning

The network is a very critical component of the data center’s infrastructure.  As things change in this very dynamic environment, the data center manager must understand the cascading affects of these changes as it relates to the network capacity of the facility, because he or she is ultimately responsible for the delivery of IT services to the organization through the network.

Typically, the network design and day to day management is handled by a completely separate group outside of data center operations, yet both need to work hand in hand to insure that the network has sufficient capacity to support the business and interruptions are kept to a minimum.  The nlyte Data Center Infrastructure Management (DCIM) solution provides the “single source of truth” for documenting the network chain for all physically connected IT assets in the data center.

As IT assets are moved, added, or changed in the data center, nlyte’s patented auto-allocation technology checks on the availability of suitable network connections in the target cabinets to insure that an open network connection is available before the change is approved.  This significantly improves the time to deploy new equipment and eliminates the risk of placing equipment in a cabinet that can’t support it.

The nlyte Floor Planner module also provides instant visualization of the network connections inside the racks on the data center floor.  These network capacity maps provide the current state of the available network connections (copper & fiber) and the nlyte Predict module can help data center managers and network administrators make better decisions about future network needs based on historical trends and planned events.

nlyte also models all of your networked devices and their relationships to other assets in your data center.  The port to port connections are modeled between all assets in the network chain and these connections are presented in a graphical network navigator that allows you to scroll up and down the network chain displaying the properties of each component in the chain.  When network problems occur, nlyte can help identify the physical location of the faulty equipment, the systems and applications that are affected, alert the proper support personnel, and direct those support personnel through the process of fixing the problem.