Two key interrelated planning issues in a data center--storage provisioning and disaster recovery--are dealt with in this paper.

Storage provisioning is a challenging task, as volumes must be carefully allocated so that none of the components of the storage hierarchy are overloaded--including device adapters, host adapters, processors, and storage. After provisioning, disaster recovery planning has to be considered, in order to deal with events such as a complete site failure.

This paper discusses the IBM Provisioning Planner, which identifies the appropriate locations for placing newly allocated volumes. The Provisioning Planner consists of three planning modules that work together to create a provisioning plan: volume, path, and zone.

The paper also discusses the IBM Disaster Recovery Planner that looks for replication technologies that can be best used in case of a disaster event. A requirements profile is specified for each data source. A data source is a logical entity--such as an application, database, or file system--that needs to be protected against a disaster. The Disaster Recovery Planner consists of a number of modules, including a discovery engine, a knowledge base, a matchmaker that determines eligible candidate solutions, and an optimizer that determines the best solutions from the set of eligible candidates.

This paper serves a very useful purpose for readers who want to understand how automated planning tools can be used for the very real and important task of planning a data center, especially with regard to the issues of storage provisioning and disaster recovery planning.