The Vicious Cycle of Computer Systems Performance and IT Operational Costs
چکیده
In today’s parallel, heterogeneous, and interconnected IT landscape, predicting and controlling the cost factors surrounding systems performance and capacity planning may seem overwhelming to many organizations. For larger IT projects, it is not uncommon to experience scenarios where the cost factors for performance tuning and capacity planning reflect the largest and the least controlled expenses. To illustrate, a sudden slowdown of an enterprise wide application may trigger user complaints, delayed projects, an IT support backlog, and ultimately a financial loss to the organization. By the time the performance problem is located, analyzed, worked around, tested, and verified, an organization may have spent tens of thousands of dollars in time, IT resources, and hardware, only to fall back into the same vicious cycle in the near future. The rather complex IT environment in most organizations today is normally considered the culprit to effectively tackle performance issues. The argument made here is that performance has to be designed into the final solution (hardware and software wise). This approach requires shifting the emphasis away from the installation and setup phase to the planning and design stages. It is paramount that organizations not only understand the expected workload behavior, but act upon accordingly by conducting feasibility and design studies prior to spending thousand of dollars on a solution that in a best case scenario, may not be optimal, and in a worst case scenario, just dose not work. Application performance issues have an immediate impact on customer satisfaction and an organization’s bottom line. It is not uncommon that while a performance issue surfaces, organizations start adding more (expensive) hardware into the operation mix, without fully understanding where the problem really is. Hence, working on the symptoms and not actually tackling the problem may provide an organization with some relieve in the short run, but intensifies the issues in the long run, as even more hardware has to be troubleshooted and analyzed. In addition to hardware costs, the IT personnel costs associated with unplanned performance tuning exercises can be excruciating. IT managers may be forced to commit hundreds of man-hours to solve even simpler performance problems. As in some circumstances, the actual source of the problem may not be easily identified, IT personnel may spend hours or days analyzing and tuning the wrong subsystem. To make matters worse, some performance tuning exercises may require crossing over into the domains of security, reliability, or availability. Without initial proper planning, fire-fighting scenarios such as these may result into additional work for an organization's security or high-availability (HA) personnel as well. To reiterate, the proper approach to managing systems performance is to design performance into a solution. If a system is already in production, the recommendation made is to conduct an in-depth performance study that includes the applications, the operating system, and the hardware subsystems, respectively. It is paramount to understand not only the actual workload behavior, but also the interaction among the applications, the operating system, and the hardware. Establishing a sound performance baseline allows an organization to proactively manage performance while the workload changes, and to conduct a capacity study based on facts and not on fiction. Treading performance related issues early on in an IT project allows getting away from the hidden cost scenarios, and is exponentially cheaper than to perform the tuning as an add-on feature after a problem surfaced.