The 5Ws of the Workload

There has been a great deal written about infrastructure optimization over the past 20 years, and everyone seems to have their own slant on what should work and why.  At Adaptivity, we believe in fit-for-purpose solutions.  Not always the cheapest, not always the fastest, not always the highest availability… but always the right choice.

The tricky part of that equation is getting to know the workloads.  In many organizations workloads are classified by their criticality (with disaster recovery (DR) and high availability (HA) ramifications).  In others, workloads are classified by their size (small, medium and large),  In still others they’re classified by the types of work performed (e.g. web server, app server).  Good organizations go deeper; they understand and acknowledge their workloads’ many facets.  These organizations have learned that this complete picture of demand is now the only way to minimize costs while maximizing infrastructure efficiency and effectiveness.

How do you get to know your workloads well enough to design (or, in the cloud, select) the most fit-for-purpose environment to run them in?  Let’s take a page from third-grade and go back to the 5 Ws…

·         Who – We have found a surprising number of organizations don’t consider who uses an application when they think about how to classify its demand.  Any architect that remembers that first job as a systems analyst should know better.  Remember the difference of sweating a call from the 45^th floor vs. one from the 3^rd floor?  Remember the difference of intensity between  decisions that impacted a revenue application vs. the lack of pressure in creating yet another HR online form?  At Adaptivity, we strive to know our clients’ business and understand what part of the business leverages each application.  A key ingredient in creating fit-for-purpose solutions.

·         What – What type of workload are we talking about?  While the who is important, there are some things that make a database a database, whether it’s being used by your trading desk, your factory floor, your lawyer or your janitor.  Add an application server and an oft-repeated pattern appears.  At Adaptivity, we understand the patterns and pattern components each of your workloads represents.  These patterns provide clues into classes of equipment that are well suited for the task at hand.

·         Why – Once we understand a workload’s who and what, we often help our clients’ in considering why.  Why are there three payroll applications in one department?  Why does accounting have its own CRM tool?  Often the easiest way to leverage the who and what for infrastructure optimization is to 86 hardware that supports unnecessary (or even scantly used) applications.  Nothing like a 100% resource reduction!

·         When – You don’t leave the lights on in your office over the weekend, why should you give resources to workloads that take the weekend off?  The key here isn’t necessarily to schedule each individual workload, but to recognize the ones that have high variability and make sure that they are in an environment that can scale up and scale down as needed.  At Adaptivity we measure scalability across four separate qualities to determine the best environment for each workload.

·         Where – So we’ve entered into the brave new world of Cloud Computing and it no longer matters where your workloads run, right?  Wrong.  Some workloads have friends and family that they can’t be effective without.  Imagine the bandwidth charges (not to mention potential security risks) you’d incur if you put your Risk Management and Trading Applications in different clouds.  Placing them in different data centers or even across different infrastructure pools may be enough to cause performance concerns.  At Adaptivity, we work with our tools and method to help you discern the IT Physics  of your organization so that your new fit-for-purpose solutions don’t bleed money or performance because you missed the where.

At Adaptivity we capture all of this information and more in our Planning and Design Studio tools and provide calculated guidance on how to design your fit-for-purpose environment or select a fit-for-purpose cloud.  With all of the fancy hardware, appliances, and cloud providers out there, this detailed approach is the only way to truly maximize cost reduction, efficiency and effectiveness.

Tags: Featured

Category: Business Alignment, Cloud Computing, Datacenter Transformation