IT Infrastructure Capacity Management - Something to Fix in 2024?

In our day to day lives experience has shaped us to use capacity management principles every day. Is there enough milk in the fridge? Do I have enough charge in the car to complete all the journeys today? How much beer do we need for a meal? Knowing current capacity and projecting forward to incorporate new requirements is part of everyday life. Or we risk unnecessary disruption and find too late that leadtimes have extended to create a panic.

It is quite understandable for IT engineers to pushback on attempts to have capacity updates added to their project workload.

Most IT mature organisations define and allocate roles so there are jobs or tasks that applies the same principles to data centres, networks, servers, compute resource, cabling, IT engineers, cabling and other shared resources. Its really simple in concept.

• What is our current available capacity?
• What would we use over a time period based on previous experience?
• Are there any short term or future requirements that may exceed normal capacity usage?
• When do we need to invest in more capacity and how much?
• Who are the stakeholders to influence decision making and time scales?
• Are there opportunities to recover or optimise capacity?
• What is an appropriate level of over capacity or redundancy to support risk and recovery needs, as well as normal day to day changes?

On December 14th 2023 I gave a webinar on managing cabling capacity where the difficulty in answering these simple questions above was explored. The conclusion was to combine project and operational infrastructure data to efficiently update capacity information as part of change activities. An empty rack in a data centre could be full from a project perspective, so what you see may not be the whole picture. A good understanding of capacity early on in a project lifecycle should reduce the need for site surveys, help assess user requirements and speed up successful project completion. Having lots of interlinked spreadsheets is one way, but a condolidated database such as AssetGen Connect is much simpler to handle space, device, switch port and cabling capacity.

Capacity management thinking happens with every request, design, change and decommission. Engineers typically need detail while managers and other teams may just need an overview to help understand and plan forward. Most capacity managers I meet are often collating data and presenting reports to senior management of available and planned capacity. Not really helping the engineering teams doing change and risk management with their daily work. So it is quite understandable for IT engineers to pushback on attempts to have capacity updates added to their project workload, as they are already busy with projects and technical documentation needs.

A good understanding of capacity reduces the need for site surveys, helps assess user requirements and speeds up successful project completion.

Presenting capacity information can be done in many ways and is often simplified with the use of thresholds and colour coding. Excel and Visio views can be tailored to show device, system and topology perspectives, and can be combined with other data such as support. The use of Visio data graphics to display capacity and detail was covered in the webinar and is also covered in this weeks Visio corner at the end of the newsletter.

In summary, infrastructure capacity management is needed to support improved planning and delivery of shared IT infrastructure changes. If done well then capacity management reduces project effort and delivery timescales. If added as an afterthought it increases workload and most likely won't be trusted or effective as the number of site surveys will stay the same.

Dave's Pet Peeves

Sometimes strategic IT decisions are made which make no sense where the guys on the ground get frustrated that focus and money are given to shiny new hardware or software, rather than trying to fix existing issues that both users and IT support teams agree on. In the day job as well as the TIA standards work I see and hear situations that haven't changed in the 20 years that Square Mile Systems has been running. Rather than list the many problems of the IT industry here are a few success stories that I hope others will repeat themselves. Maybe measurement of success is easier than lack of progress.

• Teams who had training in Visio methods now spend less time using Visio
• A baseline of a critical DC put off for years, only took one week to complete
• Critical service maps that were refreshed every 10 years, now updated weekly
• A proof of concept enabled a communication between IT teams that there were two major documentation problems to overcome, not just the one that started off the POC exercise. It was then simple to get funding approved that had been denied for years.

Sometimes it needs external stimulus to enable positive change. If only more looked outside to what others see as best practice life could be simpler and more productive. We will continue to promote good methods and techniques in 2024 through our webinars and in the TIA standards work we participate in.

Visio Corner

Visio has a few features that enable communicating and managing capacity more effectively. The Visio Data Graphics feature builds on what I have discussed in previous Visio Corner’s which helps with understanding capacity from different perspectives.

Lets use as an example upgrading servers to a newer, better and higher power hardware platform. There are a few considerations and data sets that we need to enable planning and changes:

• 1) We cannot simply pull out and replace the existing servers due to a higher power requirement, potentially causing a rack to exceed the rating in our DC power circuit breakers and cooling design.
• 2) We need to know where there is space in racks, as we do not want to put servers in racks that are nearly full.
• 3) It should go without saying that servers should go only in server racks, so we should understand any pre-allocated rack function.

The picture below shows the same row of racks with different Visio Data Graphics applied. I am using a mix of the “Multi-bar Graph”, “Colour by Value” and “Text” data graphics, so with only one Visio diagram to consult I get different capacity views to help quickly understand the options. So Rack 01-06 is the best as it has the most available capacity for both space and power.

What may be useful to a lot of readers is to display capacity using a percentage, like I have in the “Utilised Space” data graphic. Data Graphics can use more than just one shape data value to operate with. If you drop down the Data field menu when you are creating a new item for a data graphic there is the option for “More Fields…”, which allows us to insert custom formulas as well.

Combining Visio functions and references together into a formula can consolidate or summarise just about any data embedded in Visio. If you’re familiar with Excel formulas this should be very similar, as a lot of the formatting and rules are the same, but best to check with this list of shapesheet functions here .

This makes getting a percentage value rather easy, I just divide the smaller value by the larger and format it as a percentage value. I do need to put “prop.” In front of the shape data fields I want to use so the custom formula is as follows and click “OK”.

=Prop.Used_Space_Front/Prop.Height

This will give us a decimal without a % sign though so I need to format the result now. Choose “Heading 2” as the Style and click into the “Value Format Row”. You can be smart and type in the exact formatting you want, but if it’s all Greek to you just click the 3 dots on the right and select “Percentage” and put 0 decimal places. If you have been following along the Data Graphic Item you’ve created should look like the picture below.

Just substitute for the shape data fields you want to use and you will be able to display percentages where it makes more sense than absolute values for displaying capacity. The same technique can be used for other capacity information such as power, switch ports, panel capacity and cable capacity.

In 2024 we have scheduled free Visio diagramming webinars every 2 months. So you will see many of the topics I've covered in the Visio corner implemented. The first on Jan 18 13:00 UK / 08:00 US Eastern is called "Visio Tips and Tricks - Part 1 Network Diagramming"

Later on in the year we will cover data centers, application mapping and so on.

Upcoming Events - 2024

January 18th – Free Webinar, Visio Tips and Tricks - Part 1 Network Diagramming Details & Registration 13:00 UK 08:00 US EDT

February 22nd – Free Webinar, How to Document IT Details & Registration 13:00 UK 08:00 US EDT

March 21st – Free Webinar, Visio Tips and Tricks - Part 2 Data Centres Details & Registration 13:00 UK 08:00 US EDT

I hope you enjoyed this edition of this newsletter, make sure you subscribe by clicking the button at the top of the page to keep updated on future articles and events.

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