Most of us don’t have to worry about a sudden surge in traffic that will bring down our servers. However, when it comes to data, we know it’s accumulating at a much faster rate than many experts expected – and we need to plan around our data center storage needs well into the future.

The downside of not having a strategy in place for data storage is that you’re going to experience performance problems if a capacity issue happens at some point. This will lower productivity among workers, cause a loss of profit, and reduce customer satisfaction, along with other negative outcomes.

Optimize for the Future

It’s really about optimizing for current needs as well as those in the future, which means careful consideration of applications, infrastructure, and the way you provide your business services as you plan your data center capacity needs. Such a process requires that you understand current and emerging trends that could have an impact on the way you do business.

Most IT managers tend to look at the status quo and think if they are fine now, there is no reason to fix something that isn’t broken. This puts them in a position of being reactive rather than proactive, which means by the time they realize they need to upgrade capacity, the emergency has already begun.

Data Center Knowledge reported that one firm in Europe avoided $65,000 of monthly infrastructure costs by accurately forecasting their future capacity needs and planning far ahead of time instead of waiting until the system was broken. As an added benefit, they were able to use analytics to determine where the bottlenecks were in their system and boost the performance of virtual machines.

Making Accurate Forecasts

To accurately make such forecasts, organizations aren’t looking at a handful of metrics – they’re extending the analysis to many parameters from a large variety of sources, including the following:

· Memory

· CPU

· Server configuration

· Resources consumed

· Business transactions

An important note here is that data and inputs for analytical purposes can’t just be tossed together. An accurate and somewhat sophisticated analytics tool has to be employed to sift through all the variables to make sense of them and provide an accurate forecast.

At EmconIT, we offer a number of services that will help you plan for today’s needs as well as the future. Don’t risk your data with poor planning – let us guide you and recommend the best services and hardware for your company.