Avocent Data Center Planner, Improves Data Center Design, Planning and Operations Efficiency!
Rating: 8 out of 10
IncentivizedUse Cases and Deployment Scope
We used Avocent Data Center Planner to create a virtual map of our data
center and the cross-connects to all of the equipment. With it, we were
able to create an inventory of various servers, network devices,
appliances, etc we had in our data center. This allows us to capacity
plan where to put new equipment in. It also gives up the available patch
panel ports in our various racks as well as the available ports on the
various switches we have in our data center.
Pros
- Avocent Data Center Planner gave us an overview of our data center without the need to be physically there to perform an audit.
- We can visually map out and trace the cross-connect a device or server is using without a need of remote hands to trace the cable.
- It provides us the ability to capacity plan our data center. Giving us the ability to see what space is under or over-utilized and formulate a plan to adjust to correct it.
Cons
- The library of objects we can use in Avocent Data Center Planner needs to be expanded. There are times the server object we need is not available in the library.
- A more efficient way to connect objects together. It's way too easy to delete a connection mapping, a dialogue box asking if the connection should be deleted would be nice. I've accidentally deleted a connection before and it's annoying that I need to redo it.
- The ability to import diagrams into Avocent Data Center Planner would be nice. We have Visio diagram of racks and to utilize that instead of recreating it would help speed up the build in of a datacenter in the product.
Likelihood to Recommend
Avocent Data Center Planner is well suited in helping us to capacity plan our data center, increase operations efficiency and keep track of available patch and switch ports. We are able to visually view wherein our data centers are underutilized and more importantly over-utilized. We can also follow the path of the cross-connects from one object to another visually providing us another troubleshooting tool in our datacenter. Previously we had Excel spreadsheets with this information and it's can be confusing to follow compared to a visual representation that Avocent Data Center Planner provides.