About a month ago, an article was published describing how and why Hong Kong decided to leverage software to manage its subway system, widely described as “one of the world’s best subway systems.”
So it’s already one of the best, why leverage software to manage it? Because “one of the best” isn’t enough. Because “99.9 percent[1]” isn’t 100 percent.
The world’s best is now leveraging software to manage and plan “more efficiently than any human could.” Again, keep in mind that we’ve already established that this is one of the best systems in the world. And it’s getting better with software.
What does this have to do with IT and virtualization? Think of the way each must be managed: tons of moving parts, tons of knobs and levers, tons of dynamic data points, and tons of decisions that must be made constantly and in real-time to react to and, perhaps more importantly, prevent problems. In Hong Kong lives are on the line, but in your business productivity, margins, and careers are on the line.
Much like Hong Kong’s subway, your IT department must leverage software to control it if you want to ensure both performance and efficiency simultaneously. And yet in an industry literally defined by computers and software, we are still managing virtual infrastructures manually. Seems a little backwards, doesn’t it?
The only way to manage environments such as these, at scale, is to leverage software and automation. Without it, a team of humans with different levels of expertise, best practices, and knowledge, are attempting to react to problems in the virtual infrastructure after they’ve occurred and without the ability to quantify what effect an action will have. But by controlling an infrastructure (mass transit or IT) with software and automation, you can guarantee performance and maximize efficiency. What does that mean? It means a sharp increase productivity (IT staff and other business units), a competitive advantage as a result of performance, and perhaps most importantly for you and your IT department it means decreased infrastructure spend.
You have two options: keep trying to get to 99.9% by staring at screens saturated with data, graphs, numbers, colors, badges, and “health,” trying to make sense of it all so you can make a best guess at what might be an action good enough to avoid a major mishap until the next alert goes off and do it all over again. Or leverage VMTurbo to manage your virtual infrastructure, making the right decision the first time every time, in full automation.
How? By matching the VM’s demand of compute and storage resources to the supply of said resources (from the underlying infrastructure) allows your infrastructure to guarantee application performance even as workloads are constantly changing. Much like in a subway system supporting thousands of trains on a finite network of tracks and routes, a virtual infrastructure simply contains too many knobs and levers for humans to manage effectively. By guaranteeing quality of service with minimal human intervention, IT can be more agile and cost-efficient.
Why more agile? The tedious-but-essential task of babysitting the infrastructure to guarantee application performance—so the business can maintain productivity and profitability—is now handled by software. As Hong Kong, which is putting lives rather than application performance on the line, has discovered, software allows processes to be streamlined and staff to focus on more progressive and innovative tasks.
This leads to operational time- and cost-savings, but it also allows enterprises to increase “VM-to-host density.” Most organizations allow a substantial amount of headroom in their environment, and rightfully so. It’s absolutely necessary; much like Hong Kong needed to allow a substantial amount of space between their subway trains. But if all of those trains are on the same automated management system, then the necessary space (“headroom” in an infrastructure) can shrink drastically without negatively impacting performance. The implication in IT: higher safe levels of utilization, which means a higher VM-to-host density, which means your organization can now spend less (or nothing) on infrastructure to support your impending increase in virtual machine count and resource utilization.
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