Infrastructure roadmaps frequently assume compute capacity can be added independently from rack power, cooling, and fabric oversubscription. In practice, those limits interact early.
Checklist
- Establish per-rack power envelope before platform sizing.
- Validate cooling behavior against sustained AI and storage-heavy loads.
- Define east-west bandwidth assumptions per workload class.
- Reserve headroom for control-plane and observability systems.
Design note
An enterprise can tolerate moderate overprovisioning in compute. It is far less forgiving when power, thermal, or fabric headroom was modeled incorrectly.