NETWORK ANALYTICS
By Neil Collier, Technical
Director, GCH Test & Computer
Services Ltd
www.gch-services.com
Many things in life go full circle,
and IT is no different – the key
to success is optimising your
infrastructure
With the mainstream use of server virtualisation and
enterprise storage arrays, there is now a need to focus
on skills that were required in the mainframe world
for managing complex mixed workloads on shared
infrastructure with varying performance objectives.
Detailed performance analysis, workload profiling and
capacity planning, are all skills required to ensure that the
utilisation of this intricate shared infrastructure can be
optimised while maintaining the required SLAs/RPOs/RTOs
etc. Additionally, this abstraction of a customer’s workload
(applications, databases and systems) from the physical
hardware by hypervisors, and sophisticated disk arrays etc.
also means that fault diagnosis of performance problems
becomes far more complex to resolve.
As many organisations don’t have the time or skill sets to
do this type of analytical work, they are potentially missing
opportunities to save significant costs in their infrastructure,
which is also compounded by a number of further factors:
Outsourcing
Providers may not be motivated to save costs even when
there are clauses in the contract to deliver cost saving
initiatives as part of the service. Additionally, outsourcing
can often mean there is a dilution of technical knowledge
within the organisation reducing the ability to robustly
challenge what the service provider delivers.
Cloud
Despite the hype and mystique, cloud providers are
simply exploiting the same underlying technologies, and
may be focused on extracting the maximum amount of
revenue from the customers for the minimum amount of
expenditure. The potential for using the airline principal
of ‘overselling the tickets’ means that customers may
have limited visibility of the actual resource they have
available, e.g. just because their machine is provisioned with
four virtual CPUs, the physical CPU resource may not be
available if the underlying infrastructure is under high load –
potentially from other customers.
Vendors and suppliers
Vendors will often offer services for analysis and sizing, but
these will typically start with the answer – their product(s)
– and work backwards from there. Services from a cloud
provider to assess whether a customer has candidate
systems to migrate to their cloud solution, or a disk vendor
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