Transforming capacity planning in enterprise data centers

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A new imperative: real-time capacity

planning

In enterprise data centers, capacity planning is often

thought of as a complex, time-consuming exercise

reserved for select mission-critical application stacks.

Whether it’s completed as an in-house program or an

outsourced service, capacity planning is in many cases

treated as a series of narrowly targeted projects, each

focused on a different application, and each with a

clear beginning and end.

If you’re responsible for maintaining the performance

of business applications, this conventional approach

to planning may give you the confidence that you can

meet the demands of the applications that are most

important to the business. But it can also be a drain on

staff resources and leave you with an inflexible environ -

ment that can’t respond quickly to changes in demand.

Today, capacity planning is growing in importance as

enterprises turn to virtualization to help control data

center costs. In a large data center, server utilization

and application workloads can fluctuate dramatically

over the course of a few days or a few weeks, or even

within a single day. This makes it all the more important

to be able to efficiently and quickly plan for capacity

needs. What’s needed is accurate capacity planning

in real time—“on the fly” and “on the ground.”

This isn’t a vision for the future. The era of real-time

capacity planning is here today. This era is made

possible by new software tools that capture thousands

of data points each day on each server’s utilization

and power consumption, and then provide insights into

best-fit scenarios.

Technology silos and underutilized

capacity

To fully explore current challenges in capacity planning,

it helps to look at how server capacity is used in today’s

data centers. For the last 15 years, it has been com -

mon practice to run one application per server. This

approach tends to create technology silos that can

lead to chronic underutilization of resources.

Transforming capacity planning

in enterprise data centers

Enabling real-time analysis and optimization

of server capacity and power use

Summary of content (4 pages)

PAGE 1
Transforming capacity planning in enterprise data centers Enabling real-time analysis and optimization of server capacity and power use A new imperative: real-time capacity planning In enterprise data centers, capacity planning is often thought of as a complex, time-consuming exercise reserved for select mission-critical application stacks.
PAGE 2
When capacity is locked into technology silos, servers assigned to some applications might use just a small fraction of their processing power. These servers take up valuable floor space and drive up power and cooling costs. And all of these challenges are intensified when IT assets are often spread across multiple and varied data centers.
PAGE 3
It’s easy to see how historical CPU utilization for a workload has performed over time. To solve the waste problem, you need better knowledge of your environment, including accurate information on system trends and a better understanding of best-fit scenarios. Data alone isn’t enough. You need tools that can quickly sort through and analyze massive amounts of data and then generate meaningful information that you can put to work in your capacity planning efforts.
PAGE 4
Beyond processing power, HP Insight Dynamics – VSE helps you overcome your power and cooling challenges by enabling energy-aware capacity planning. It provides the hard data you need to intelligently plan for your server capacity and power needs, taking service levels into account. For example, you might run scenarios that show what happens under different consolidation approaches and then compare different configurations to determine the best options for power utilization.