The intelligent management of computing workloads

The rapid increase in the availability of on-demand IT infrastructure gives IT departments the flexibility to cope with the ever-changing demands of the businesses they serve. Hereafter, the majority of larger businesses will be running hybrid IT platforms that rely on a mix of privately owned infrastructure plus that of service providers, during some small business will rely exclusively on on-demand IT services.

Any given IT workload must be run in one of these three fundamental computing environments; dedicated physical, private virtualised and shared virtualised.

However, the benefits of this flexibility to deploy computing workloads will only be fully realised if the right tools are in place to manage it. As a matter of fact, without such tools, costs could start to be driven back up. For instance, if the resources of an IaaS provider are used to cope with peak demand and workloads are not de-provisioned as before long as the peak has past, unnecessary resources will be consumed and paid for.

A workload can be defined as a discrete computing task to which four basic resources can be allocated; processing power, storage, disk input/output and network bandwidth. There are five workload types:

1. Desktop workloads provide users with their interface to IT2. Application workloads run business applications, web servers etc.3. Database workloads handle the storage and retrieval of data4. Appliance workloads deal with certain network and security requirements and are either self-contained items of hardware or a virtual machine5. Commodity workloads are utility tasks provided by third parties on the whole called up as web services

A series of linked workloads interact to drive business processes. Each workload type requires a different mix of resources and this can change with varying demand. For instance, a retail web site may see peak demand in the run-up to festivities and require many times the compute power and network bandwidth it needs the rest of the time; a database that relies heavily on fast i/o may need to be run in a dedicated physical environment; virtualised desktop workloads may need plenty of storage allocated to ensure users can always save their work.

The intelligent management of workloads is fundamental to achieving best practice in the use of the hybrid public/private infrastructure in other words here to stay. To manage workloads in such an environment requires either generic tools from vendors just as Novell, CA or BMC or virtualisation platform specific tools from VMware or Microsoft. Such products clearly have a cost, nevertheless this is offset by more efficient use of resources, avoiding problems with security and compliance and providing the flexibility for IT departments to better serve the on-going IT requirements of the businesses they serve.