The Thing about Going Green…

Going green is the new mantra for both business and IT. In this economic climate, one might wonder why now’s the right time for businesses to up their investments in the environment, rather than squirreling away their money. Truth be told, being green ultimately boils down to reducing IT costs. Remember, corporate data centers require massive amounts of power to upkeep and maintain.

It takes careful planning to shave excesses, however. That means you need good data on which to base your decisions. So datacenters need insight into the actual resource requirements for their applications, not just estimates. More often than not, datacenters over-provision the application environment to ensure they can meet peak loads. Of course, application loads don’t remain at their peak for the better part of a 24 hour operation. The solution lies in provisioning capacity on-demand.

Dynamically scaling capacity to meet application needs remains a holy grail in the world of IT management. Virtualization and cloud computing both promise solutions to this challenge. However, these technologies bring only the mechanics for on-demand provisioning, not the control system for allocating or removing capacity. Building intelligent procedures for dynamic provisioning requires close monitoring of the quality of service your systems are delivering to your customers. Should performance breach your service level objectives, on-demand measures should kick-in.

The better your grasp of service quality, the better optimized your control system will be. What’s the best way to measure quality of service, you ask? Well, we think its best measured by monitoring the transaction performance, service usage and fault rates experienced by your end users, not the CPU and memory consumption of your servers.