Web Operations

Capacity Planning

After ensuring that your data is effectively protected, capacity planning is the second most important responsibility you have as a storage professional. Planning ahead and ensuring that your applications and services have enough resources to operate and grow without hitting the ceiling is not only critical, but also mandatory. The benefits of scaling capacity and headroom ahead of demand are enormous. It reduces stress both for you and for the application, allows for unexpected spikes in utilization, and helps avoid unplanned capital expenditures.

I always try to maintain at least six months' worth of headroom in my storage environments. Having a proper capacity planning regimen in place makes forecasting capital and operational expenditures predicable, and also allows for planning datacenter space, power, and supply-chain logistics more effectively. The last thing you want is to receive that phone call in the wee hours of the morning letting you know that your production workload has overrun the performance or capacity capabilities of your infrastructure. Here's a situation where capacity planning went very wrong.

I worked at a company where we used NAS appliances to store files that users would upload and later view. The NAS appliances were correctly sized for their workload and were also capable of replicating the files asynchronously to a secondary NAS appliance at a site located several thousand miles away. The systems could comfortably store and serve files, ...