Foreword

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This document was prepared by Joint Technical Committee ISO/TC JTC 1, Information technology, Subcommittee SC 39, Sustainability, IT and data centres.

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Introduction

The global economy is increasingly more reliant on information and communication technologies and the associated generation, transmission, compute and storage of digital data. All markets have experienced growth in the digital data for social, educational, medical and business sectors. There are a wide variety of data centres within private enterprise, shared/collocation and cloud service providers that meet the growing demands of the digital data. The growth of this digital data will continue at a rapid pace with the development of devices within the “Internet of Things” category, artificial intelligence applications, and the increased ability to generate and transmit data while mobile with the deployment of 5G technology. With the transition from air-cooled information technology (IT) equipment to liquid-cooling technologies, with the advent of processors requiring higher power demands, it is also important to coordinate IT air-cooled vs liquid-cooled provisioning plans with facility provisioning plans.

Compute and storage technologies and requirements continue to change rapidly. This creates challenges for IT professionals who are responsible for planning for the provisioning compute and storage systems, and the networks interconnecting the systems. Data centre IT systems and platform ecosystems typically have life-cycles of 3 to 5 years. However, IT provisioning planners are challenged to identify provisioning requirements beyond even 1 year. This results in significant challenges for data centre facility provisioning planners who are responsible for identifying requirements for data centre facility systems that have life cycles of 10 to 25 years.

Data centre IT personnel responsible for provisioning IT systems are often unfamiliar with how the IT systems impact facility planning. They are also often unfamiliar with the abundance of information that is available to them that can help the facility planning personnel to develop a holistic, long-term plan for provisioning data centre facilities. This has resulted in reactive provisioning. This has also impeded data centre facilities personnel responsible for planning power, cooling and space provisioning. The data centre facilities personnel have little or no knowledge of IT requirements or advanced notice of facility system capacities required to support IT systems that are to be deployed within the data centre.

With this background, growth of digital data is inevitable, and the reactive planning status quo will result in greater frustration for both the IT and facilities provisioning planners. There is therefore a need for a method to benchmark and trend IT provisioning using standard indicators, processes, and reporting.

A data centre provisioning key performance indicator (KPI) will provide a method to profile future IT system and platform requirements over the life of the infrastructure. This method is based on the data centre’s current IT applications and systems, the assets of the IT equipment platform, their expansion or contraction trends, and the impact of future changes in technology network, compute and storage processing density and efficiency. Coordinating the DCitP with the DCfP KPI will help develop long range forecasts that extend beyond the current IT equipment life-cycle. This will help guide designers and planners to optimize the capacity of the facility infrastructure, providing greater efficiency of the resources implemented.

This document, in combination with ISO/IEC TS 8236-1, defines the benchmarking, trending and reporting methodologies to be used to develop a holistic long-term provisioning plan.

The data centre provisioning KPI will be influential in guiding data centre designers and planners when developing a design power usage effectiveness (dPUE) defined in ISO/IEC 30134-2. The data centre provisioning KPI can be used in place of an arbitrary estimated IT load to develop the dPUE. The data centre provisioning KPI will provide owners, designers and planners the opportunity to forecast IT loads using a consistent methodology based on the provisioning profile.

1 Scope

This document specifies a standardized method of optimizing facility provisioning within data centres by utilizing KPIs that enable the development of facility profiles for individual systems or platforms. The combination of the system and platform KPIs are used to establish a facility provisioning profile, establishing standard forecasting methods to optimize data centre resource effectiveness.

This document:

defines a method for identifying benchmarks and trends in facility provisioning;
provides capability assessment/indicators of facility infrastructure over the infrastructure life-cycle including preparatory, commissioning, expansion/contraction and/or retirement of IT equipment;
describes the relationship of DCfP to dPUE (ISO/IEC 30134-2), providing a common methodology to base dPUE.

2 Normative references

3 Terms, definitions, abbreviated terms and symbols

3.1 Terms and definitions

3.2 Abbreviated terms

3.3 Symbols

4 Integration of DCitP with DCfP

5 Data centre facility provisioning

5.1 Introduction

5.2 IT provisioning trends

5.3 IT provisioning profiles provided

5.4 Facility provisioning trends

5.5 Facility provisioning forecast

6 Data centre facility provisioning for ITE technology refresh example

6.1 General

6.2 Analyse available RUs

6.3 Analyse available power

7 Reporting of DCfP

8 Application of DCfP to establish dPUE

9 Application of DCfP to forecast facility capital expenditures (CAPEX) and operational expenditures (OPEX)

9.1 General

9.2 In-house data centre CAPEX and OPEX

9.3 Colocation data centre services and OPEX

9.4 Managed data centre services CAPEX and OPEX

9.5 Public cloud services OPEX

Bibliography