Most of us remember from childhood Robert Southey’s tale, “The Three Bears,” where Goldilocks searched for the perfect bowl of porridge, chair, and bed in the house of the three bears, testing each until she found the one that was “just right!” I often think about this tale when considering data center infrastructure planning. Infrastructure planning is the careful art of ensuring a balance between available infrastructure supply and customer demand, while optimizing operational and capital costs, using the Goldilocks Principle.
Traditionally, the focus of data center operators was on operational uptime levels and management to meet uptime availability targets. However, as the scale of cloud infrastructure reaches global proportions and availability moves in the application layer, the focus has turned to efficient use of capital in delivery of cloud infrastructure and services. Taking a page from manufacturing and retail industries, which optimize product delivery across the entire supply chain — from manufacturing and distribution to retail delivery — how can we apply supply chain concepts and methodologies to the cloud industry in order to optimize delivery to data center customers?