What is Data Center Capacity Planning?

Plans are a part of daily life. Not limited to any specific industry, decisions have to be made as a natural part of existence. Leaders, however, are uniquely positioned not just to make decisions but to enable their teams to act according to strategic direction.

Data centers are no exception to this reality. Plans and strategic direction can make tangible differences in the data center’s functionality, overall performance, and the end consumer, making data center capacity planning crucial.

What is data center capacity planning?

Data center capacity planning is a type of planning which assesses the data center to ensure that the center’s workload can be adequately met.

Practically, data center capacity planning involves assessing the data center—from computing resources, cooling capacity, power load, and more—and then forming and enacting a plan to make sure that all workload demands can be met and even improved upon. As a result, this planning can reveal areas of improvement and potential dangers that allow leadership to enact plans for data centers to function optimally.

Why is data center capacity planning important?

Planning can generally enhance the operations of any data center, but its importance is being underscored in light of the shifting demands on both physical and virtual assets. With environmental concerns and financial needs, more attention is turning to plan to prepare for the future while deferring the consequences of a lack of planning and ill-used or under-utilized assets and financial resources.

Not only does this shifting landscape reveal the need for data center capacity planning, but also such critical analysis of server hardware resources and more has multifaceted benefits to businesses and consumers.

It can give insight into power and cooling to enable the optimal function for the given workload and attend to network and storage capacity. Careful planning can ensure that mistakes within performance are acknowledged and avoided while ensuring that mission-critical processes are safeguarded and enhanced.

Further, data center capacity planning can eliminate waste and idle assets while decreasing the likelihood of debilitating outages interrupting business operations.

How can data centers improve their capacity planning?

Basic tools such as spreadsheets traditionally were the essential assets for planning, but now options such as 3D renderings, virtualization, cloud computing, and even outsourcing have been proffered.

One tool stands out as exponentially beneficial. Many have explored the myriad benefits of DCIM software to give unique insight and solutions into capacity planning.

Such tools aren’t the only resource available to help with capacity planning; communication between facilities, IT, and additional business decision-makers and leaders must be strengthened to troubleshoot, forecast, and adapt.

Selecting tools, enhancing communication, and engaging with data center capacity planning can significantly benefit the data center’s footprint, power consumption, cooling capacity, performance times, load calculations, and more.

For more resources on capacity planning and data centers, including Hybrid Digital Infrastructure Management (HDIM), continue exploring nlyte.com.