Panoptic Capacity Planning Presented by

"Scotty, I need warp speed in 3 minutes or we're all dead!” (William Shatner - Star Trek II ‘The Wrath of Khan’)

Setting the Scene Our business’ demand bigger, faster, more agile and more efficient services from their IT resources Companies can no longer afford to just build new datacentres, or expand existing ones, but most are now full or filling How are we going to install new services, or upgrade existing ones, with parallel running, without the lights going off? How can we migrate services and data when everything is full? Where will that “swing space” come from? How can I prove that Capacity Management is a worthwhile expenditure?

The problems we face Who is responsible for Datacentre capacity? Who has seen an explosion in Wintel Servers? Who has managed to consolidate their Wintel estate? Who has tried to use Virtualisation to resolve the Wintel problem? Who has filled up their Datacentre(s)? Who knows the %age of Datacentre resources used by Storage? Who has found Virtualisation to be cost effective? Who thinks they can plan an entire infrastructure?

What do we get asked to do? Take all of the business constants and variables to predict, plan and manage the IT infrastructure costs, report on GreenIT issues and manage the datacentre facilities. We have to show the effect on the network of adding more users We have to cater for changes – Planned and unplanned We need to predict when we will need more storage and of what type We have to help plan and control licence costs

What do you need to know? How many servers do I need and of what specification? How much storage is required of what type? How many network switches and ports? How many SAN Fabric switches and ports? How much site to site WAN capacity is required? How much tape backup capacity do I need? How much data replication capacity is required on the WAN? How many racks do I need? How much Power and Cooling capacity is required? Will it all fit in my datacentre, or do I need a bigger one?

What inputs do we need to get you there? A baseline of the existing infrastructure and services All new user rollout volumes and schedules All new applications/services being developed and schedules All tech. Refresh options Understanding of new technologies being examined Understanding of current expenditure/maintenance Locations of all datacentres and comms between them User site locations and comms between them Details of each change being proposed to live service

Our methodology We take a baseline of the existing infrastructure and services or we can build from scratch if a greenfield project. We examine the original designs and the current usage We model storage (Fast, Slow, backup, tape, fabric etc.) We calculate the server farms including ancillary servers We calculate network bandwidth

SAN Security Event Management Database Services Performance Management Management Services Web Services Instant Messaging Hosted Applications Search/Archiving Collaboration Web Services Network Core Switch Network Access Switch Network Core Switch SAN Fabric Switch SAN Fabric Switch SAN Tier 1 SAN Tier 2 SAN Tier 3 SAN Tier 1 SAN Tier 2 SAN Tier 3 Backup WLP Network Access Switch TIER 2 Services TIER 1 Services TIER 3 & TIER 4 Services File Services Print Services Local Exchange/ Other Local Services (Citrix etc.) Data Centre Users SAN

How does this look?

What does this mean? In basic terms, this will allow us to calculate how the datacentre will look:  How much power is required into the site  How big the backup generators need to be  What the switchgear should look like  How big the UPS’ need to be  How many in-room PDUs are required and how big  How much cooling is required  How much floorspace and how many racks are required

Our Model (1) Every single device is stored uniquely in a database, and allocated to a service Each device is assigned to a Tier, a workstream and a role Every device has its dates stored and used in the model  Installation date  Go live date  End of life/service date  Decommission date  Removal date User population is modelled, users added by date and quantity Devices can be sized by scaling factors, 10 of X requires 1 of Y We use a monthly calendar to add and track changes

Our Model (2) DR/BC is factored in Links back to Design docs and change docs We link in to each user site, to determine which DC the users get homed to  This also enables us to apply a WorkLoad Profile to determine anticipated traffic levels We model various network components  SAN Fabric (and the VLL for replication)  Backup network  WAN  User site LANs  Datacentre LANs (including inter-Tier traffic, inter-server traffic and user traffic)

Our Model (3) Storage Tiers are modelled  Tier 1 – EMC Symmetrix (Exchange & SQL) requires inter-site replication and differing RAID levels (5 and 10)  Tier 2 – EMC Clarrion is used for slower data access such as EDRMS and backups  Tier 3 – EMC Celerra NAS is used for user filestore  Tier 4 – StorageTek Libraries are used for tape archival and long-term, rarely accessed, read only file store  Fabric capacity between Tiers and servers  Storage modelled by application and user volumes Network Devices are modelled  Core and Access Switches  Security devices  Packetshapers  WAN optimisation such as Riverbed’s Steelheads  Devices need ports (clustered, non-clustered, rack limitations etc.)