Chris Haynes – [Senior Systems Consultant]
Is your data center infrastructure being used the way you intended it to? Are you in control of your organization’s IT data? If your organization is like most, probably not as well as you would like to.
A good data center capacity planning strategy can help your business become more efficient, dynamic, and competitive, but few organizations dedicate resources to capacity management or give it any importance. If it does exist, many times it is usually just to satisfy regulations or to check a box on a form.
The tendency of many IT departments is to play it safe by purchasing more server and storage capacity than needed, which means resources are being wasted at a time when IT departments are being asked to do even more with less. On the flip side of the coin, some IT departments are not able to anticipate the growing IT demands of the business, and react to them in a timely manner, potentially resulting in lost business or costly reactionary purchases.
In order to proactively meet the demands of your organization’s needs, you need to develop data center capacity planning processes and procedures that will track and report on the following metrics:
- How much is being used?
- Who is using it?
- At what rate is it being used?
- How much is left?
- When will we run out of it?
Having the answers to these questions at any point in time allows your IT department to be proactive and take steps accordingly to stay ahead of the business’ needs. Being able to project future needs allows your organization to budget and plan for data center growth and scalability in advance, which is almost always cheaper than unplanned emergency purchases.
Does your organization need help developing a data center capacity management strategy? Please contact your Keller Schroeder Account Manager to see how we can help.
