Data Center Capacity Management

The dynamic nature of business today continues to place challenging demands on the modern data center. Data center capacity management has classically been a pain point, and continues to be so as hardware continues to become more powerful, hosting technologies evolve, and customers expect ever greater flexibility in your ability to scale both up and down on demand, in an instant. On one hand, you need to have the available capacity to support fast scale ups; on the other hand, excess capacity sitting idle is a waste of both power and space. Finding the right balance is the key to maximizing ROI, and can be the difference between flourishing and closing down shop.

Device42 tackles these data center capacity management challenges with a variety of different, complimenting feature sets. Heat maps make it easy to tell, at a glance, if racks are utilized efficiently, or if there is wasted space and therefore room to grow without investing in more racks. Complimenting rack utilization, color coded power bars reveal racks with excess power capacity as well. “What-if” scenarios intelligently analyze rack space, smartly suggesting the best options to deploy new hardware. Combine this with Device42’s thorough power and environmental management and monitoring features, and flexible reporting functionality, and you have a solution you can trust to assist in making capacity planning related decisions to support both growth and efficient utilization of space.
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Heatmaps for rack capacity provide “at a glance” visual understanding of available rack space within your datacenter (a feature of the power management license module)

Visualize rack utilization from the room layout view, featuring customizable thresholds are utilized to illustrate available rack units (U’s)

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Visualize rack capacity right from the rack list page

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Device42’s powerful “What-If” scenarios support intelligent decision making. It’s never been easier to locate the most appropriate available space in your racks to ensure you utilize your most precious, limited resources – space and power per square foot – as efficiently as is possible, maximizing ROI for each rack U.

Tell Device42 a little about your hardware’s size and power requirements, and Device42 will determine the most appropriate racks to deploy to based on:

Rack unit space (U’s) required
PDU power outlet availability
PDU power capacity (watt) availability
Redundant connections availability

One of your customers is scaling up their deployment, and has ordered 5 new servers to be deployed in one of your most heavily utilized data centers. You need to locate racks with enough free space, available outlets, and available power; and it needs to be in the same room the as the rest of their deployment.

Specify the device criteria – Size of the servers, power requirements, etc.

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Select location to search. In this case, we know we need space in the same room the customer is already utilizing

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Choose “What if”. Device42 will search for racks meeting your criteria, and display the most appropriate options for deployment of the customers new hardware

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Device42’s Power Management Module will prove invaluable for data center capacity management. Beyond providing the power bar charts discussed above, the module also auto-discovers and supports monitoring of a variety of Power Units (iPDUs, ATS, UPS) and Environmental Sensors to ensure your single source of truth has all the information you need to make intelligent capacity management decisions.

Historical data availability plays an extremely valuable role in capacity related decision making, eliminating the guesswork when, for example, locating data center hot-spots, or conversely cool spots where there may exist an opportunity to reduce costs and scale back on cooling – one of the largest data center related power costs, and therefore opportunity to find savings, behind powering the servers themselves.

Whether expanding, migrating, or dealing with the unexpected, Device42 will become your trusted source for accurate insights for understanding exactly what your data center is doing, no matter how large it may be.

How many outlets are available? Do all my devices have redundancy? Have any devices been overlooked for redundancy? Device42 has the answers.

View PDU outlet availability and visually ensure redundancy with chain maps

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What did power consumption look like last year? What has the average temperature been in rack X over the last month? Is there enough spare power and cooling capacity available to add compute capacity? Device42 has the answers.

Power consumption, temperature, and humidity data over time

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Device42 provides not only comprehensive means to collect and organize data – its robust Reporting system means making sense of and presenting this data has never been easier. Managing data center capacity month after month, and year after year requires logical, concise, accurate reports to keep things running smoothly, and to ensure costs are both understood and controlled.

Whether preparing a report for a customer, an auditor, or financial stakeholders looking for high-level information, extensive report customization can produce a report containing exactly the data needed for a given audience.

Device42 has at the ready a number of pre-configured report templates geared at answering important data center capacity management questions: “Change History”, “Contracts”, “Operating Systems”, “Power Usage”, and “Rack Space Availability”

Contracts report – determine which devices have expiring or expired contracts and verify devices are working properly while still under warranty.
Operating Systems report – prepare for upgrades, estimate or earmark a budget. e.g. Migrating Windows Server 2003 to Windows Server 2012
Power Usage report- determine the amount of power being consumed by a particular room, rack, iPDU or a single device over time.
Rack Space – inspect the change in available U’s over time; plan for rack consolidation to boost efficiency, or know if you’ll need more space to support growth pace

With powerful data filters, date filters, and scheduling features, and nearly unlimited customization potential, Device42’s reports take the guesswork out of data center capacity management.

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