The new Premiership football season is well under way and every
manager is hoping his star talent and ‘squad strength’ will see his
team through the late autumn sun to the dark cloudy evenings of
winter. There will be huge disappointments, but a new season, like
the latest technology of Cloud Computing, promises much.
One tactic to managerial success is to have the maximum
resources available. But in IT, like football, this costs money.
Virtualization is driving hardware costs down, but cloud computing,
which promises almost infinitely low-cost resources, could also
mean more own goals.
The Cloud is simply a virtual datacentre shared (multi-tenanted)
by several organizations. The logic is simple - why pay for 100% of
a machine which runs only 20% of the time? A fully virtualized
application moves resources onto and off The Cloud rapidly. Imagine
watching Match Of The Day while being able to substitute
virtual players from your favourite X-Box game.
The reality of such ‘rapid substitutions’ is messy. Those
promised cost benefits require more IT management. Virtual
appliances may only be data files, but large and active ones, which
are paged frantically.
Some applications, such as databases, are so memory-intensive
that a move to The Cloud can kill performance. The Cloud changes
where applications store data, affecting both I/O and CPU
contention. The overheads needed by virtual appliance cocoons or
the Cloud Operating system impact user response times, directly
affecting application performance.
Today’s mere hot spot analysis of traffic volumes will not be
enough. All transactions are not equal. Leading to a ‘Superleague’
of corporate transactions, too important to be ‘demoted’ to the
Cloud for fear their performance cannot be guaranteed. The real
solution needs to correlate Cloud events, like virtual appliance
migrations, with business service levels.
Challenging or impossible? Transaction Performance Management
(TPM) solutions are evolving to solve just such a challenge.
TPM tunes the application, appliances and the Cloud OS, matching
virtual appliances to the correct storage devices, based on
patterns of storage access and by business priority. This allows
prioritization and charge back for higher value transactions. Such
advanced TPM delivers:
1) Parameters for optimized virtual application performance
2) Guidance to the Cloud Operating System (OS) on virtual appliance
invocations
3) Guidance to the Cloud OS on the dynamic allocation of
application workloads
4) Guidance to the Cloud OS on virtual appliance scheduling to
avoid resource contentions
The economic benefits of the Cloud are irresistible. But no CIO
would trade business-critical transactions failure for even a
tenfold cost saving. Losing a match, albeit with bargain strikers,
is unacceptable.
The IT industry’s momentum behind the Cloud, means it cannot
fail, and is therefore just a Cloud-ready TPM solution away from
deployment in production.
- Precise Software has developed Transaction Performance
Management software