Your data center is playing a song
Every data center has a rhythm. When you think about a single application—SAP, for example—it has certain “beats.” First thing Monday morning, you see a steady and fast cadence, while over the weekend, it slows to a light tap. And there may be seasonality that rises to a crescendo. Now, add all this to the tempo of your hundreds or thousands of other applications, and you’ve got a complex cacophony with drum beats, bass lines, melodies, and vocals all coming together into a “song” with verses, choruses, bridges, and codas. This music, which may be a simple pop ditty, a syncopated jazz song, or an orchestral symphony, is unique to your data center.
You can’t, however, just listen to the rhythm of your data center and instantly determine if it’s playing Sinatra’s “My Way,” Mozart’s “Jupiter Symphony,” or the latest Taylor Swift hit. Fortunately, this is something that Virtana Infrastructure Performance Management excels at.
What the rhythm of your data center tells you about performance and availability
Let’s go back to the SAP example. Virtana IPM will reveal the notes of your SAP application and how that fits into your overall data center song. For instance, it will show you that SAP usage is primarily between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. during the work week and that during those times, the utilization of servers is 60%, storage virtualization is 40%, there’s no CPU contention on VMs, and there are no memory pressures—and that the backup occurs on the weekend. Furthermore, it will show you the business cycle over time, e.g., certain times of the year when utilization spikes, as well as application dependencies, what application changes are happening, etc.
Now that you know all of this, you can configure the system to notify you when the application starts singing a different tune. For example, if the backup is spilling over into Monday morning, or if utilization suddenly goes to 80%, or if there are a bunch of runaway processes that start showing up, or if there’s a slow-drain device somewhere in the infrastructure that will affect SAP’s performance. Because SAP is a mission-critical application for your business, you want to know these things, including details and recommendations that will speed troubleshooting and remediation, so you can get ahead of them—before they lead to user complaints. In other words, you want to quickly get all the various components back to playing the song they’re supposed to be playing.
What the rhythm of your data center tells you about capacity optimization
In addition to managing application/workload performance and availability, understanding the rhythm of your data center is also critical for optimizing your infrastructure. With the help of Virtana IPM as well as Virtana Capacity Planning, you can see where there is existing capacity to take advantage of, helping to save money. And when you do need to invest in new equipment, you have data-driven business justification for the new spend.
Get the rhythm of your data center with Virtana IPM
Virtana IPM is a fully integrated performance and availability management platform with deep visibility, real-time data correlation, and actionable insights. Virtana IPM:
- Gathers data across compute, storage, and network with unmatched breadth and depth and translates that data into actionable insights.
- Identifies anomalies that are causing or will cause performance issues or outages and then provides AI-powered recommendations on how to resolve those issues.
- Provides a single pane of glass to detect hotspots before they impact application performance, balance the workload across your entire infrastructure, and more accurately plan for migrations and future capacity requirements.
In other words, with Virtana IPM, you’ll understand the rhythm of your data center, identify anything that’s going off beat or out of tune, and get information to help you fix it. Request a trial
Ricardo Negrete
