We’re going for optimised workload delivery...

Who wouldn’t want IT to be delivered in a more dynamic, flexible, agile, [insert your least detested buzzword here] way? Optimal configurations for server and desktop workload delivery have been discussed, and indeed, attempted, for many years. So how close are we to really nailing this?

The answer to this question may depend on what your view of ‘optimal’ is, and this will surely depend on the workloads in question. Availability and stability may be the key requirements for a software application, whereas throughput may be most important factor for a transaction-processing engine. But application workloads are also dependent on the kit you have to run them on, and the management tools at your disposal. There are other factors as well, not least of which being users’ expectations.

Much of this boils down to deciding which elements of service delivery matter the most. Response times are the ‘old faithful’ of SLAs, but they mask criteria such as availability, scalability and accessibility wherever a user happens to be. These are important factors, of course – but from an infrastructure perspective they are as much symptoms of a well-engineered server environment, managed properly, as anything.

Considering the former, we know that organisations are often prepared to take a gamble with the resilience features they build into the infrastructure. And as for the latter, i.e. good management, we have learned from a number of studies that while things are not broken, they could always be improved.

However, could the question of ‘optimisation’ be fundamentally unanswerable due to it being a moving target? Future demands for scalability and performance, for example, will ask new questions when it comes to delivering current workloads. All you might care about today is keeping pace with the demands of the business. This, of course then begs the question, just how rapidly do the demands for service vary in your organisation?

If things are static, then keeping things running without too many user complaints may be all you need to do in terms of optimising your infrastructure, at least until someone brings in some new challenge from on high. Perhaps a desire to save money is driving you to review your infrastructure at the moment, for example.

If, on the other hand, the demands of your users vary frequently, are you indeed seeking the better way when it comes to optimising how your IT is managed and delivered? A number of options purport to help in this area. For example, are you actively seeking to make use of virtualisation technologies to enable you to manage service delivery as dynamically as the business requires? Maybe you are even considering using cloud-based IT resources to make up for any short term in-house constraints?