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.”
A few stats from SearchDataCenter.com’s annual data center survey:
-In 2011, 40% of respondents said that the IT department is responsible for paying the power bill, while 60% do not. The matter of IT departments footing the utility bill is in decline from 2010, where 47% of IT departments paid for power and 53% did not.
-In 2011, 51% of IT professionals reported using ducted or plenum containment to control air flow in the data center, 43% use hot-aisle containment and 39% use cold-aisle containment. These findings are similar to 2010 results, except for a slight uptick in 2011 in ducted and cold-aisle containment use. There was also a small decline in the use of hot-aisle containment.
-In 2011, 54% of IT respondents reported using raised floors, while 40% deployed slab floor. This is a notable change from 2010 where 58% of IT professionals used raised flooring and 33% used slab flooring.
An excellent article from SearchDataCenter.com’s data center advisory board, The causes and costs of data center system downtime, featured Uptime Institute VP, Rick Schuknecht.
Schuknecht leads Uptime Institute’s elite data center end user network. From the article:
Schuknecht said 73% of data center downtime is caused by human error. Human error includes poor training, poor maintenance practices and poor operational governance. He said an outage can be very stressful and damaging to morale, because jobs and compensation are often based on an organization’s availability goals.
Schuknecht also said that if an organization has a good investigation protocol in place, they can determine the root cause of the outage and identify steps to take in the short and long term. But that only works if you have an effective protocol in place.
There are some overlooked repercussions to an outage. For example, there is a regulatory penalty in financial industries. An outage can also erode a company’s competitive edge, like loss of business reputation within the industry and/or customer base. Where would you rather put your money? In the bank with no downtime or the one with repeated downtime? Most financial companies have processes in place to preserve or recover data; it’s the loss of transactional continuity that can cause the biggest problems.
What can data center staff do to avoid and mitigate system downtime? Schuknecht recommends establishing a good facilities and computing maintenance program for each piece of equipment, creating a staff training program that describes how and when to respond to downtime events, provide adequate funding levels for operating expenses to make sure everything works properly and institute a good governance program where site infrastructure is operated in accordance with manufacturer expectations.
In this series of Q&As with SearchDataCenter.com’s Steve Bigelow, Uptime Institute weighs in on the top issues facing data center owners and operators today. These interviews also preview next week’s Uptime Institute Symposium content.
Data center construction alternatives: New data center facilities are incredibly expensive to design, build, manage and maintain, but a new build isn’t necessarily the answer in every circumstance. While some organizations can certainly justify the investment in new facilities, there are many others that want options and alternatives that can give them the facilities they need to run their business without breaking the bank or taking years to deploy.
Efficient energy use and energy security in the data center: Efficient energy use has become a central issue in data center design and management. Energy costs are always increasing, and even the availability of power can be a gating issue for data center construction or facility expansion.
Follow us on Twitter @UptimeInstitute and the Symposium conversations at hashtag #uisymp11.
SearchDataCenter.com just ran an article featuring its Data Center Advisory board, featuring data center thought leaders and advice from the trenches about setting aside time for strategic planning.
From Uptime Institute’s contribution to the article: So many managers are locked into the day-to-day firefighting; they never get out of the reactionary mode to plan ahead. The consequences can be dire. I wouldn’t want to be the manager who has to go to the executive team to explain why a data center ran out of capacity sooner than expected. But even if you’re not at risk of running out of capacity — just the day-to-day waste that comes from not aligning data center and business needs can really eat at your company’s bottom line.
Is your organization at risk of running out of data center capacity? Are you considering moving compute loads to the cloud, increasing virtualization investments, evaluating colocation options or planning a new data center? Are you responsible to deliver this message and formulate a strategic plan? These aren’t the kinds of projects you can handle if you don’t make time for formal strategic planning across all of the silos in the organization, from server and storage management to the facilities team.
Uptime Institute Professional Services started engaging clients recently to sit these different parties down in the same room to create a Digital Infrastructure Roadmap, which is a way to optimize your IT cap-ex and op-ex investment with input from all of the stakeholders in the data center.
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. 
