“LMG is uniquely qualified to deliver high quality Cabling Infrastructure Managed Services. Our teams under-stand the business and technology challenges of infrastructures of all types and sizes and combine that with unique, proven processes, systems and tools that significantly increase infrastructure efficiency. ”

Mike Hook, CEO, LMG


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OPTIMIZING CAPACITY MANAGEMENT
In today's high density, power efficiency driven data centre environments, the need to provision equipment more effectively has never been more important. 2iCabSelector minimizes resource waste, utilizes data centre resources to their fullest, and ultimately maximizes the lifespan of the data centre. 2iCabSelector enables data centre operational teams to maximise their data centre resource utilisation by scientifically calculating the most suitable cabinet location during the equipment provisioning process.

By interrogating your existing1 data centre capacity management data with 2iCabSelector you will:

   example
Accelerate the provisioning process - returns the optimal cabinet location <20secs
Select the most suitable device location that will optimize your power, space and network resources 
Automatically administer load balancing policies
Avoid pre-maturely shortening the lifespan of the data centre
Access key performance metrics for capacity efficiency and utilisation
   
CAPACITY MANAGEMENT TODAY
The data centre capacity management function's goal is to:
 
Ensure that the DC has sufficient resources to serve the needs of the business
Determine where equipment can/should be located
 Provide insights into when the data centre will be full
Data centre capacity management should also manage the allocation of resources to ideally arrive at a point where all resources reach 100% utilization. At this point, the data centre will have maximized the investments made in it, minimized waste and extended the data centre's lifespan.

CAPACITY PARAMETERS
Key parameters used to calculate data centre capacity performance are a relative comparison of the following:		  
Power vs Physical Space vs Network Services (LAN, SAN, iLO etc)  
and so a balanced use of these resources would show a linear usage of each when compared against a baseline parameter.   
Space is an ideal baseline as shown in shown in fig 1. The graphs illustrate a perfect datacenter or cabinet which scales linearly with space and power usage. The same principle can be applied to network and SAN resources.  
     
BELOW OPTIMUM DATA CENTRE CAPACITY   
In reality, data centres do not scale this way due to a number of factors including varying server specifications or architecture, adoption of disruptive technologies (i.e. virtualisation), connectivity design, commercial constraints or security constraints and unwittingly poor deployment choices.
Not reaching 100% utilisation of key data centre resources is more often the result of some or all of the following: 		   CCT
Over provisioning of cabling & network resources in the design phase  
 Significant variation from the forecasted server mix/growth  
 Poor choice of server deployment location   

EQUIPMENT LOCATION: SUITABILITY NOT POSSIBILITY		  
2iCabSelector assess the impact that the piece of equipment to be deployed would have on each suitable cabinet in the data centre. The effect that the device would have on the cabinet's capacity profile is calculated and a score is given (Fig 4). The goal is to find the cabinet that is best suited to receive the device so that the cabinet's resources utilisation factor (RUF) is either maintained at the optimum or has the most positive effect on correcting the cabinet's RUF toward the optimum. By this process, 2iCabSelector recommends the most suitable cabinet, instead of merely creating a list of ‘possibilities'  
   fig 4  

INTEGRATION WITH DATA CENTRE INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS		  
2iCabSelector works by referencing your existing cabinet configuration data that is typically stored in a data centre management application such as:  
 Systimax iPatch  
 iTRACS IM, PLM and iCDC  
 RiT PV4E  
Aperture Vista  
 Nlyte  
     

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