Having just emerged from some serious white paper writing it seems like a great time for a new post. We released three new papers last week, and before I put my pen down I will keep the momentum going for a few more paragraphs so I can chime in on what we, and the market, have been up to. And I will avoid the urge to make lame excuses as to why it has been so long since I have posted - having firmly established a pattern of infrequent blog posts in the past I can safely ride along on a finely crafted wave of low expectations. I should also mention that two of my colleagues - Gerry Smith and Chuck Tatham - will be joining me in posting to this blog to share their insights from now on.
The three new papers cover some interesting topics: one is a total update of our virtualization paper (which was over one year old), one is a discussion of virtualizing applications onto mainframes, and one is a smaller paper on advanced workload analysis. The last two papers cover features being released in version 4.6 of our product, which we announced April 22.
The new release has some interesting features around personality-based benchmarking and contention risk analysis. Although this all sounds wonderfully esoteric, the new capabilities actually serve two simple purposes: to understanding what a workload will look like when it is virtualized, and to determine how high to stack workloads before the risk becomes unacceptable. Neither of these topics is trivial, particularly when cross-platform transitions are involved (hence the advanced benchmarking) or when stacking ratios are high (hence the risk analysis). And both of these conditions seem to be arising more and more.
Which brings me to the market. Vendors seem to be releasing bigger and bigger systems, and in many cases it makes a lot of sense to use larger, vertically scaled nodes over smaller “commodity” servers. I’m sure HP’s new DL785 systems will swallow up workloads like they’re going out of style, and this model joins existing offerings from IBM, Unisys and Sun that pack a surprising amount of horsepower in a single x86-based system. The extreme end of this trend is, of course, the mainframe platform, and we also see a surprising amount of interest in understanding what applications will look like on mainframes. Perhaps even more interesting, this demand is coming both from organizations that want to use their spare capacity as well as shops that currently have no mainframe footprint at all. Interesting times indeed.
Which makes the aforementioned features very important. When analyzing workloads between platforms simple MHz-based estimations of relative performance are out the window. It becomes all about the workload personalities, and the relative capabilities of each platform to host a particular type of workload. For example, if you are calculating PI to thousands of digits then your best bet would probably be to run it in a screaming x86 or RISC-based system with a high per-core compute performance. If, on the other hand, you are analyzing an OLTP database workload, the relative performance of a mainframe may win the day. These types of decisions are becoming more and more common, and many large organizations are undertaking “fit for purpose” projects in order to figure out what their chosen platform is for each type of workload.
This fit for purpose applies not just to the individual servers, but also to the types of virtual pools and clusters being built. Critical, transaction-oriented workloads will often require a different kind of resource pool than non-critical or batch-oriented workloads. Building different pools to different performance specifications allows IT organizations to provide multiple hosting options to internal and external customers, and resources pools that are designed to run critical applications may be more expensive to be hosted in than lower-spec batch pools. This variety of options essentially amounts to virtual fit for purpose, and the ability to create such infrastructure and offer multi-tier hosting options to end consumers will certainly spell doom for one size fits all virtualization planning.
I would go on but I would be repeating words that are written elsewhere. Every topic has a best document to be in, and if this discussion were any longer it would no longer be suitable for a blog posting. Think of it as literary fit for purpose…
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