Accelerating data centre capacity planning

Future Facilities has introduced Release 14 - the latest version of its industry leading 6SigmaDCX digital twin software. The latest version of Future Facilities’ data center digital twin accelerates the capacity planning process by unifying IT and Facilities under one platform that spans the entire planning process. Leveraging toolsets such as 6SigmaAccess and 6SigmaRoom in the 6SigmaDCX suite of products, customers have already seen satisfaction rates around their planning process double within 12 months. One healthcare customer achieved this through using 6SigmaDCX to create efficiencies in its infrastructure, decreasing the data center’s cost to house each megawatt of infrastructure by over 25%.

The latest version of this software tackles core problems in the industry, highlighted by recent research. For example, the tension between IT and Facilities teams is leading to greater compromise and downtime, with 90% of IT operations teams compromising on capacity. To try and mitigate the issues of capacity planning, operators are building 50% more data centers than they need. DCX14 has therefore been developed to be a data center digital twin that provides a comprehensive platform for operations that can streamline capacity planning, speed up decision making and enhance infrastructure performance. 

“IT, operations and Facilities teams continue to be under enormous pressure to deliver capacity as quickly as possible without running the risk of increased downtime. This has not been helped by the latest run of DCIM tools not living up to their initial hype. A consequence of these pressures is that research has shown that nearly a third of businesses must compromise decision making processes all of the time,” said Jonathan Leppard, COO at Future Facilities. “We designed DCX14 to solve these issues by speeding up decision-making processes and enhancing infrastructure analysis throughout the life of a data center. We firmly believe that the digital twin for the data center, backed by simulation, is the wave of the future.”

Additional benefits for DCX14 include:

• Generate comprehensive dashboards, change management reports and an email notification system to aid planning 

• Create “behind the scenes” schedulers for automated problem solving and reporting

• Develop a complete capacity picture with the new Data Network—adding port availability to existing power, space, cooling and weight metrics

• Connect the external cooling infrastructure (e.g. chillers) to the internal cooling infrastructure to understand the resilience of a data center during a system failure

With over three quarters of organizations seeing increased demands on their existing power and cooling infrastructure, it is a critical issue that is having an impact across the industry. 

Jonathan Leppard continued: “We have already seen from our customers who are using a digital twin a five-year ROI of nearly $40 million. The days of making decisions by the rule of thumb are numbered. Data centers are critical for any business, and with the digital twin, their performance can be maximized to match business demands.”