Turbonomics

How does Turbonomic work?

Turbonomic Application Resource Management is used to keep your infrastructure in the desired state. This is an ongoing process that solves the problem of ensuring application performance while achieving the most efficient use of resources and respecting environmental constraints to comply with business rules.

This is not an easy problem to solve. Application Resource Management must consider many different resources and how they are used in relation to each other and many control points for each resource. As your infrastructure grows, the factors for every decision increase exponentially. In addition to that, the environment is constantly changing – to stay in the desired state, you are constantly trying to hit a moving target. To perform application resource management, Turbonomic models the environment as a market consisting of buyers and sellers. These buyers and sellers form a supply chain that represents levels of units in your inventory. This supply chain represents the flow of resources from the data center, through the physical tiers of your environment, into the virtual tier, and out to the cloud. By managing relationships between these buyers and sellers, Turbonomic provides management of resources from the data center to the application. See Figure Supply Chain for a visual layout of buyer and seller relationships.

Turbonomic uses virtual currency to provide a budget to buyers and allocate resources to cost. This virtual currency assigns value at all levels of your environment, making it possible to compare the cost of application transactions with the cost of disk space or physical space in a data center. The price a seller charges for a resource changes depending on the seller’s supply. When demand increases, prices rise. When prices change, buyers and sellers react. Buyers are free to look for other sellers who offer a better price, and sellers can duplicate themselves (open new stores) to meet increasing demand. Turbonomic uses its financial scheduling engine to analyze the market and make these decisions. The effect is an invisible hand that dynamically guides your IT infrastructure to optimal resource use. To get the most out of Turbonomic, you should understand how it models your environment, the type of analysis it performs, and the desired state it works to achieve.

The Desired State

The goal of Application Resource Management is to ensure performance while maintaining efficient resource utilization. When both performance and efficiency are maintained, the environment is in the desired state. You can measure performance as a function of delay, where zero delay provides the perfect QoS for a given service. Efficient use of resources is a function of utilization where 100% utilization of a resource is the ideal of the most efficient utilization.

If you plot delay and utilization, the result is a curve showing a correlation between utilization and delay. Up to a point, as you increase utilization, the increase in latency is small. There comes a point on the curve where a small increase in utilization results in an unacceptable increase in latency.

On the other hand, there is a point in the curve where a reduction in utilization does not provide a meaningful increase in QoS. The desired state lies within these points on the curve. You can set a threshold value to post an alert when the upper limit is exceeded. In that case, you would never react to a problem until the delay has already become unacceptable. To avoid the late reaction, you can set the threshold to post an alert before the upper limit is exceeded. In that case, you guarantee QoS at excess cost – you increase operating costs and never achieve effective utilization. Instead of responding after a threshold is exceeded, Turbonomic analyzes operating conditions and constantly recommends actions to keep the entire environment in the desired state. If you perform these actions (or let Turbonomic perform them for you), the environment will maintain operating conditions that ensure performance for your customers, while ensuring the lowest possible cost thanks to efficient utilization of your resources.