Organizing sites

Sites represent a location hosting physical infrastructure, such as a data center. A site can actually represent one or more data centers of varied size or meaning. You can organize sites by region and sites can include components that are further organized into racks and locations.

The following object types describe the core elements of a site and how they may be organized. Each object type may be managed through the UI and can be found under the Organization menu. APIs to manage the objects are also available.

  • Sites
  • Region
  • Racks
  • Locations
  • Rack reservations
  • Site groups

You can use object groups to control user access to Site Planner objects such as sites, regions, racks, locations, rack reservations, site groups, devices, circuits, connections, IPAM, and many other objects. Object-based access control (OBAC) enables you to control access to Site Planner objects efficiently. For more information about OBAC, see Managing object groups.

Sites

A site is normally used to represent a location hosting physical infrastructure, such as racks and devices. How these are organized depends on your use cases, for example you may choose to represent each data center at the edge of your network as a single site or group several as one logical site.

Sites are a mandatory element of any site plan which intends to include physical infrastructure (you will later see that all racks/devices must be associated with a site), they must be given a unique name and may optionally be grouped by region and/or tenants.

Sites may also include geographical information, such as it's physical address, and contact information if relevant.

Regions

A Region may be used to group sites. Depending on your use case, you may choose to group sites geographically, for example by city or country, or by another other logical use case.

Racks

Used to represent the equipment racks in a data center in which devices may be installed. Each Rack has a front and rear face in which devices may be installed.

Racks must be associated with a site but may be further organized by:

  • associating with a particular tenant
  • associating with a location
  • assigning a rack role

The width (in inches) and height (in units/U) of the rack are mandatory whilst other dimensions such as whether it's wall mounted or post frame are optional.

Locations

Locations are used to organize racks into logical sets. How these are used depends on your use cases and your usage of site. For example if a site represents a group of multiple edge data centers then you may use locations to represent the racks at each individual data center.

Locations may be nested in another location, allowing you to organize the racks belonging to one site into hierarchical model.

Rack reservations

Reservations may be created to indicate that a set of rack units on hold for use in the future. A reservation is for informational purposes only, it does not prevent a user from creating a device and assigning it to the reserved unit in the rack.

Site groups

Use site groups to organize sites by role or function. You can nest site groups into other site groups if you want to organize them into a hierarchical model. Each site group must have a unique name within its parent group.