5 Strategies for High-Return ConvergedInfrastructure Efficiency Xangati Blog Atchison Frazer Vice President, Marketing
July 17, 2015
Xangati Blog Organizations that care about server efficiency and converged-infrastructure ROI keep a steady eye on their resource utilization statistics. There is always the temptation to push resource consumption into the red and get the most bang for the invested buck. The obvious path around running hot is to add more hardware resources, and that leads to a second inevitable truth: Ultimate performance carries incremental, hidden and unpredictable costs.
Efficiency is not about maxing out utilization, nor is it about achieving the highest possible MIPS, IOPS or any other standard metric. Technically, efficiency is about the ratio of useful work performed to the energy expended. What can you do to optimize your converged-infrastructure efficiency? Here are five strategies you can start implementing right now to bring your organization much closer to optimal efficiency and long-term cost savings:
Xangati Blog Strategy #1: Link Capacity Management With Infrastructure Performance Clearly, there are many variables to weigh when seeking to balance capacity and performance. Xangati can inform these decisions with dashboard analysis tools that assess all available resources in the infrastructure and counsel IT managers about suitable capacity and performance possibilities. Xangati’s measurement models focus on performance degradation, so its service assurance analytics platform is particularly sensitive to finding the levels at which capacity saturation yields performance loss. Strategy #2: Identify Workload Type and Infrastructure Performance Requirements Public cloud providers are particularly sensitive about efficiency. Consider the workload models of a Google Mail or Microsoft One Drive infrastructure. Ultra-fast responsiveness for a budget-oriented (or even free) app isn’t nearly as important as keeping performance at modest, “good enough” levels while prioritizing the lowest possible back-end cost of operation. Private clouds often support revenue-generating operations, so there is a higher emphasis on performance and responsiveness, even if it means sacrificing efficiency.
Xangati Blog Strategy #3: Determine How Much Public Cloud Belongs in Your Mix The benefits of public cloud infrastructure are well known and headlined by the duality of cost savings and greater control for management, not to mention cloud compute resources that are cheaper than ever. However, shared infrastructure almost always carries an inherent performance penalty, and the more critical the workload being placed on those shared resources, the higher the risk of incurring a performance limitation, and risk to cloud-sprawl and governance issues. Strategy #4: Begin With End-User Quality of Experience (QoE) Increasingly, the starting metric for infrastructure performance is end-user QoE. IT operations may assume that running at 70 percent of capacity is acceptable, but if QoE reports start trickling in at 50 percent and become a torrent at 60-70 percent inflation, then you need to know which fine-grain metrics to heed.
Xangati Blog Strategy #5: Establish Baseline, then Extrapolate Service Assurance Gauging the ultimate capacity of a set of hybrid-cloud infrastructure resources can be very difficult if testing begins when that infrastructure is already under dynamic overload. The best way to obtain a solid, dependable baseline against which future assessments can be made is to start with an standard configuration running a base platform. After adding applications and VMs, deploy a real-time, live monitoring tool to beta-test how utilization characteristics change as load increases all the way up to current, “production-level� utilization. With this in hand, you should be able to extrapolate the gap from present utilization to your threshold target.
Xangati Blog The quest for efficiency is, in large part, a search for pockets of inefficiency, and finding those pockets manually can be incredibly tedious and time-consuming. Xangati’s virtualization-cloud management dashboard specializes in zeroing in on the right metrics to inform efficiency gains and presenting their potential service assurance outcomes in correlated, intuitive terms. The Xangati platform excels in integrating app visibility into its performance analysis engine and automates conclusions about the IT infrastructure’s total efficiency picture. These conclusions, in turn, can form the basis of optimization strategies for greater efficiency balanced against measured capacity demands.
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