3 Steps to Determining the Requirements for Your Datacenter

By Redapt Marketing | Posted on October 21, 2019 | Posted in Modern Datacenter, Operations, Infrastructure

Building out your datacenter is about more than simply doing rack and stack. Without having a firm grasp of your needs, you risk blindly throwing money at the project and the very real potential you’ll end up with a datacenter solution that is no real solution at all.

Our system integration services are designed to be holistic and thorough. That way, before a single rack is even put in place, you know the eventual solution will meet all of your business challenges.

If your organization is considering building out new datacenter infrastructure, we recommend taking the following steps:

1. Identify your business objectives

At the beginning of any system integration project, we like to start at the end to understand what the client is trying to achieve and then work backwards to help them achieve it.

If your company is thinking about building out your own solution, you need to know what your business objectives are, then take a look at what those objectives will mean for your eventual datacenter. Some specific questions to answer include:

How much capacity do you require now and into the future?
Do you want to reduce the size of your on-premises infrastructure or expand it?
How much are you willing to change your development process?
What are your security needs?

Click here for a complete guide on modernizing your datacenter.

Once we feel we both have a clear understanding of your business objectives, we’re ready to move on to the next step.

2. Gain an understanding of your internal capacity

Not every enterprise has or even wants to have, the in-house knowledge and capacity to build out a datacenter. Even those organizations that do may want to keep that engineering talent focused on other projects.

By having a firm grasp on your current abilities, we can best tailor a datacenter build out that meets all your needs without interruption to your process.

3. Get to know your workloads inside and out

Before getting into specifics like spec configuration and storage needs, we want a thorough understanding of your current application workloads, how your infrastructure performs or creates bottlenecks, and what you feel is already working and what could be improved.

A big part of this step is assessing what apps you currently rely upon, and whether those apps will benefit you going forward, depending on the final datacenter buildout. We’ll also identify other apps you might want to take a look at that could work more effectively.

After these steps...

Once we have a full picture of your needs, your current capabilities, and your workloads, it’s time for us to put together a blueprint for your datacenter buildout.

This blueprint will include everything from hardware procurement or custom builds, to testing and configuration of components, automated software development, and the delivery of production-ready stacks.

For a lot more on building out a datacenter no matter the size of your organization, download our free whitepaper, Taking the Leap with On-Premises or Co-Location Datacenters.