Uptime Institute recently participated in SearchDataCenter.com’s Data Center Advisory Board Q&A on capacity planning. In the article, Steve Carter, Uptime Institute VP of Digital Infrastructure Services explains how companies can start looking at long-term planning.
Carter warns that traditional capacity planning forecasting practices will lead to over-building:
“Many new data centers are significantly over built. My belief is that using common capacity planning forecasting practices in use today will lead to at least 2X over specification of spatial requirements. Common capacity planning practices are not keeping pace with the realities of advances in hardware and the software that enables visualization/consolidation capabilities.
“I believe this gap is and will continue to lead to over-specification of total data center infrastructure requirements from the IT load perspective. Understanding how application load drives IT infrastructure requirements, and how IT infrastructure requirements drive data center facilities requirements needs to be better understood at more granular level. In the past, a lot of this was guesswork. We can no longer estimate future IT electrical loads by simply projecting past IT load parameters based on historical UPS electrical load profiles.”
The Uptime Institute and 451 Group will be hosting a breakfast event on Thursday, November 17th focusing on Managing Tomorrow’s Evolving IT Infrastructure from 8:00am – 11:00am at the Harvard Club of New York City (35 West 44th Street).
To register click the link.
The sessions will include:
Cloud Computing: How the Global 2000 are Evolving their IT Infrastructure presented by Ken Male of TheInfoPro
The Digital Convergence of IT Infrastructure presented by Steve Carter of the Uptime Institute
for further details.
Uptime Institute is now regularly publishing online videos: profiling data center leaders, commenting on new tools and metrics and showcasing data center operational excellence in its Network membership. 
