How to plan the infrastructure capacity?

How to plan the infrastructure capacity?

Follow the following guidelines to expand data center availability to avoid space waste or even capacity shortage.

This is almost impossible, but someone still needs to do it: predict the space, power, and cooling needs of the data center in the future. This task is very difficult, and the emergence of cloud computing makes infrastructure planning more difficult.

The construction of data centers is very expensive, and rectification, upgrade or expansion are destructive and potentially dangerous.

Space is always a rare resource, so do not ask for more space than actually used. This also applies to power supply and cooling: related power facilities also require space-sometimes more than the calculated area-and are also the most expensive part of expansion. If the estimated amount of energy required is much higher than the actual amount of energy, the data center project may fail or the cost saving measures may be problematic. Wrong assessment of capabilities may lead to the end of your career and become a burden on IT infrastructure performance.

No one can achieve 100% accuracy, but there are also some guidance that can be used to analyze infrastructure capacity issues and possible future development trends, so that you can have a relatively reliable estimate of data center capabilities. If a reasonable method is used to increase production capacity, these requirements can be proved.

IT ground space

 

Figure 1 The ground space required by the data center cabinet is greater than the space occupied by the Cabinet

IT engineers tend to estimate the occupied space by using the number of cabinets, but they need to consider the actual occupied space of each cabinet. How much space does a cabinet actually occupy? There are many ways to answer this question, so choose one of them to use and use this rule in a unified manner.

The actual occupied building area of the Cabinet is the actual length of the Cabinet multiplied by the depth, but the current situation is also changing. Cabinets are getting bigger and bigger to adapt to higher device density, deeper server shape and more cable connections. The cabinets with a width of 30 "and a depth of 48" (760*1,200mm) are very common.

According to the definition of ashrae tc 9.9, the actual cabinet space also includes the aisle space around the Cabinet (see figure 1 ). Structural floor load and the thermal density inside and around the cabinet. If a 30 "x 48" cabinet is designed for placement, a 4' (1.2 meters) aisle is required, the cabinet space is 2.5 'x 8' or 20 bungalow feet (1.83 m² ). You can also separate the area of the Computer cabinet and aisle area, but this method is easier.

IDC site

The total IT work area is equal to the total number of cabinets multiplied by the Cabinet floor space. If you want to introduce modern power distribution equipment, you also need to add an extra large cabinet on each line.

The calculation is used for supporting cooling equipment. Additional space is reserved at the bottom of the row for mobile devices to provide services that meet the requirements of fire safety regulations. The cooling of main channels can easily increase the space occupied by cabinets by 75% to 100% Based on the space occupied by cabinets. A truly effective design may require less space. Conversely, poorly shaped and columnar filled rooms occupy more square feet of area. Even so, with these major data, you should not seriously underestimate or overestimate the required site area.

To improve the accuracy, You must select a more advanced power and cooling solution for the data center in advance. Even for the purpose of estimation, the differences between different options are not significant: the row cooler is like adding a cabinet, and the space of the air conditioner in the peripheral data room should be excluded (CRAC ); the backdoor heat exchanger will increase the Cabinet depth by about 6 "(150mm), increasing the Cabinet footprint, but it can reduce most of the CRAC.

Capacity Outsourcing

To predict the number of cabinets required for IT capabilities, contact the host hosting or Agent O & M site, or consider replacing IT with a cloud instance. You can analyze the company's outsourcing planning from the perspective of evaluating the feasibility of outsourcing services. Have management and financial management, participate in the formulation of shared business directions, and ensure final product support.

These guidelines are asked during the evaluation:

What are the user churn rates in different systems? Devices that change frequently cannot be interrupted. Hosting a site requires a lot of money to pay for the infrastructure, so stable operations will be more economical than outsourcing. Based on ongoing changes, ECs may be easier to operate and maintain than hardware. List your systems and indicate the possibility that each system leaves the data center.

What is your operational risk tolerance capability? Cloud computing options are unlikely to be considered for high security and risk avoidance requirements. Hosting sites may be less reliable than your existing data centers, and may have backup power supply, cooling, and connectivity problems. Analyze the risk levels of the system and classify the system.

Is backup storage a good off-site candidate solution for O & M that requires large-scale storage, regardless of archiving or image operations?

Energy Problems

The actual energy consumption is used to describe the Cabinet density. The actual power consumption is much less than the total rating of the nameplate. The rated value will result in the reserved power usage from 40% to 60% higher during data center design. Please refer to the following steps to select a UPS system suitable for the enterprise scale.

Energy consumption, cooling and Density

IT infrastructure space does not include infrastructure: uninterruptible power supply (UPS), water-cooled units, water pumps, main distribution centers, generators and other central equipment. According to the empirical rule, an additional 50% of the total data center area needs to be prepared, according to Uptime Institute Tier II facility requirements, while Tier III requires 75% and Tier IV requires at least 100%.

Compression-Data Center devices are increasingly loading more energy into smaller devices-increasing the power and heat dissipation required for each cabinet. However, this does not have much impact on the actual space requirements. Although the devices become smaller and more powerful, we will still need more and more.

Plan the energy according to the actual situation. If the metering distribution board is configured for the Cabinet and the data center infrastructure management software is used to calculate the actual energy consumption of each cabinet, the actual power consumption load can be accurately determined.

Density is not a big problem. Although it is predicted to be 25-40 kW for each cabinet, only a small number of cabinets in the data center actually exceed 8-kW, while most of them are in the range of 5-8 kW. Therefore, unless you are running a high-performance computing research instance, it is almost impossible for the entire data center to run over 35 kw of cabinets at full capacity.

 

Figure 2. Use this chart to estimate the power consumption of a data center.

If you cannot determine the current power consumption, there are three methods to evaluate:

Read the UPS display panel. Divide the total load Watt by the total number of cabinets to obtain the average watt of each cabinet. If you are running a 2N UPS configuration, each UPS actually bears only half of the load, so you need to read the two systems, add them, and divide them by the number of cabinets. The power consumption of abnormal cabinets also needs to be calculated. For example, blade servers with high utilization may operate at 12 KW of the power of each cabinet.

View the circuit breaker rating of the branch circuit board. The circuit breaker should be loaded to only 80% of the total quantity on a continuous basis. Use figure 1 to determine the maximum capacity of the Cabinet circuit. If the cabinet is a dual circuit, the energy comes from two different panels and circuit breakers, and the maximum load is only based on one of them.

Use a clamp gauge to measure the actual load on each branch circuit. These are all instantaneous measurements that do not affect the fluctuations of the day, but we have the idea to estimate the real cabinet load. For dual-circuit cabinets, the load of each circuit breaker must be summed.

Bundle high-density cabinet groups to predict the overall space. Instead of designing the entire data center horizontally, it is better to split it into high-density and normal-density requirements to reduce costs and space. Increase the area by 25% for real high-density cabinets (more than 15 KW), consider additional power and cooling requirements. If you want to use a fully redundant 2N cooling system, you can add an additional 25% area.

Change Design

A good design will allow expansion of capacity units without affecting the operation of the infrastructure. In this way, the initial capital investment can be reduced, and the service can be flexibly added when the business is increased to achieve high utilization.

Adhere to the modular cost estimation strategy. There is no reason to install the predicted maximum UPS and cooling system on the first day of business launch. Otherwise, a large amount of expenditure will be wasted.

Some things must be fully installed before the new space starts to be built. Pipelines and Main Wiring must be available. Otherwise, when the data center continues to grow, it will need to handle the heavy internal work of the data center. Subsequent expansion in electrical/mechanical support may require IT shutdown, which directly denies all your achievements in infrastructure planning.