Achieving the
High Performance
Data Center
with Intelligent Capacity Planning
and Performance Management
Contents
1. The High Performance Data Center Drives the Agile Business
2. Data Center Performance Management (DCPM): A Unified Approach Combining Visibility, Analysis and Control
3. Sentilla DCPM Platform for Intelligent Data Center Capacity Planning
4. Sentilla DCPM Use Cases
5. See, Analyze, Control: The Proactive Data Center
The minimalist approach of this highly efficient Citroen 2CV (60 miles to the gallon) used a dipstick, as opposed to a gas gauge on the dashboard, that often left the drivers stranded when they forgot to check the dipstick for fuel level in the tank. This is an example of “a great means of transportation [that] failed regularly for lack of instrumentation.”
Garbani emphasizes that application performance management (APM) must take the unified approach to managing IT infrastructure – hardware,
software, virtual and physical – and ensure that all components perform to keep an application up and running in an optimized fashion.
The data center is the heartbeat of every agile business: it must deliver data and services continuously at increasing business velocity. This means the data center must proactively and continuously provide capacity to meet dynamic business requirements.
Data center capacity is the aggregate capacity of all data center assets. These assets extend beyond the physical and virtual systems of an IT infrastructure to the equipment that powers and regulates the actual data center climate and environment. Capacity is neither cheap nor easy to manufacture. Today, IT must re-think data center capacity management from a “what’s required now” mentality to a far more strategic vision of dynamic capacity allocation. Forced to juggle its priorities between business demands and increasingly complex data center provisioning strategies, IT is even more hampered by a flat or only marginally growing budget.
Under such tight conditions, data centers have no room for capacity mismanagement.
Over-provisioning servers is an unacceptable money-drain on the organization, while capacity shortages can cause performance degradation or even service disruption. Because business advantage and competitiveness depend so much on an enhanced technology infrastructure and the optimized capacity to run it, the data center has to shift pace and become more agile: be ready to anticipate urgent, new business demands and embrace new technologies while remaining within its current cost structure.
Achieving that level of agility requires optimized capacity based on a unified view of data center performance, starting at the individual asset level. Comprehensive asset visibility, analysis and control are the pre-requisites for any data center’s transformation to a high performance data center.
Data center performance management (DCPM) takes a unified approach to benchmarking and forecasting – against dynamic business needs – the aggregate performance of data center assets. The “unified approach” is highlighted by Forrester analyst, Jean-Pierre Garbani, in his article “If you don’t manage
everything, you don’t manage anything” with a
clear message: failure to monitor one element can lead to the failure of the entire system. Specifically, he draws attention to the failed design of an early generation Citroen 2CV gas gauge as an analogy to explain why IT should focus on all components of the IT infrastructure:
The High Performance Data Center
Drives the Agile Business
Data Center Performance Management
(DCPM): A Unified Approach Combining
Visibility, Analysis & Control
Data center performance management takes this APM model one step further, measuring not only IT asset utilization and response time but also environmental metrics such as power utilization and peak demand against business objectives. Why? Failure of one underlying component supporting the IT infrastructure (e.g. maxed out power capacity) could disrupt business-critical applications and processes. With the data center being at the core of every business-critical application, IT shortens the path to agility by taking a holistic approach to managing data center performance – by accurately analyzing, forecasting, and planning for system and environmental variables to ensure up time and available capacity of every on-going and upcoming project.
Visibility, analysis, and control are three DCPM functional capabilities essential for delivering data center capacity, performance, and agility.
1. VISIBILITY
Broad, deep, and continuous monitoring unites
comprehensive asset visibility with performance trends to give IT both “in the moment” and historical performance intelligence about all the data center resources that support its business-critical applications. A myriad of application performance and enterprise management software exist today, but they provide only a partial view of these attributes. What IT needs is a “manager of managers” approach to monitoring. This approach leverages the integration of physical and virtual systems along with any enterprise/IT asset management and building management systems already in place for a unified view of the data center.
Visibility, analysis, and control are three DCPM functional capabilities
2. ANALYSIS
Continuous performance analysis correlates
individual asset KPIs – such as computational utilization, memory, storage, network, and power – and compares them against each asset’s capacity limit to determine available headroom, or analyze the historical maximum/minimum/ average capacity for performance comparison. These measurements bring critical insights into each component’s current operating capacity as well as highlight potential bottlenecks and wasted resources that demand attention. Using DCPM, IT can pinpoint which applications are the major consumers of each resource and drill down into the root causes of asset
failure, resource contention or capacity shortages. IT can also investigate virtual machine memory allocation as well as storage oversubscription or peak power demands of the physical environment by analyzing deviations from planned efficiencies. This analysis is a continuous, iterative process that must begin with baseline measurements of workloads, systems, and equipment. With a historical perspective on consumption, utilization and costs, IT will be able to analyze variances and take action to improve data center performance – through accurate demand forecasts and what-if planning.
Using DCPM, IT can pinpoint which applications are the major
consumers of each resource and drill down into the root causes of
asset failure, resource contention or capacity shortages.
3. CONTROL
Capacity forecasting and what-if planning gives
IT hands-on control to ensure a high performing data center. DCPM functions can accurately portray current resource usage and available capacity for new applications based on a specific asset’s historical resource consumption and its ongoing utilization patterns. In addition, continuous capacity planning enables IT to forecast which physical or virtual assets can effectively serve specific applications or workloads, giving IT the ability to proactively shift workloads on the fly to more suitable assets and better meet the dynamic needs of the business.
In addition to forecasting asset utilization and capacity, DCPM provides what-if scenarios to help IT evaluate cost/performance trade-offs for multiple hardware options and service deployment
strategies: from virtualization, cloud computing, server consolidation, to hardware refresh. Approaching this type of planning manually using spreadsheets or a hodgepodge of planning tools requires “an army of elves” to map, track, and analyze change and its related impact. With DCPM, IT can automate data center capacity planning by focusing on the important objectives: providing accurate data center capacity forecasts and appropriate data center capacity to meet business needs.1
With clear insight into downstream resource requirements, IT can focus on implementing the necessary changes to operate – continuously – at optimum capacity, meeting the requirements that support an agile business.
Achieving the High Performance Data Center
The Sentilla data center performance management (Sentilla DCPM) platform is purpose-built and designed to drive an intelligent capacity planning process by enabling:
• VISIBILITY – Sentilla pulls real, system data of every type – compute, memory, storage,
network, power and space – and generates performance information where none now exists. Sentilla’s extensive integration with systems, equipment and enterprise management software, combined with its patent-pending intelligent Inference Engine, fills the information gaps while giving IT comprehensive data center asset visibility with salient overall data center performance trends. These form the basis for corrective actions and strategic application deployment decisions. • ANALYSIS – Sentilla generates granular
real-time and time-series based utilization, consumption and cost metrics. The result is
insight to answer critical questions such as:
Sentilla DCPM Platform for Intelligent
Data Center Capacity Planning
what was the peak CPU or power consumption last holiday season, or during the last major product launch? What application hogs the most CPU or memory? What set of assets consumes the most power with the least utilization or are hot-standby systems with zero utilization? Leveraging these metrics IT can run detailed reports to enable highly accurate forecasts, explore detailed scenario planning, and optimally deploy applications to better align the data center with the demands of the business. • CONTROL – The Sentilla “manager of
managers” approach gives IT control of the data center through a single pane of glass.
As IT shifts to managing the data center as a unified entity, seeing the performance of all infrastructure components in one place is crucial. When performance characteristics (e.g., consumption and utilization impacts) of all the data center systems can be aggregated, analyzed, and understood, IT can manage change with confidence.
Integration with CMDB systems:
Emerson Aperture VISTA BMC Atrium
Integration with enterprise
management systems:
IBM Tivoli TEMS BMC ProactiveNet
HP Business Availability Center VMware vCenter
Individual system-level monitoring:
Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) SNMP
BMC Patrol Ganglia
Server management systems:
Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI)
HP Integrated Lights-Out Management (iLO2 and iLO3)
Sun/Oracle Lights Out Management (LOM, ALOM, ILOM)
Blade-systems support:
HP On-Board Administrator (CLI) IBM BladeCenter (SNMP) Cisco UCS (SOAP)
Storage monitoring:
NetApp (SNMP, CLI) HP 3Par (SMIS, CLI) EMC Symmetrix (SMIS, CLI)
Network equipment monitoring:
Cisco Catalyst switches (SNMP) Foundry switches (SNMP) Dell switches (SNMP)
Power distribution infrastructure:
Cabinet Distribution Units from APC, Raritan, ServerTech, Baytech
Integration with facilities
monitoring:
Liebert SiteScan (SSWEB/SOAP)
OSISoft PI, Johnson Controls Metasys (OPC) Modbus over TCP/IP
Sentilla Provides Comprehensive Data Center
Trends and Asset Visibility
Sentilla leverages agentless integration of physical and virtual systems, enterprise/IT asset management (EMS) and building management systems (BMS) already in place, and an extensive library of connectors to give IT a unified view of the data center. Through the “manager of managers” approach, Sentilla connects and aggregates data from a wide range of resource types and vendors. A partial list includes:
Sentilla DCPM Use Cases
Customers are seeing the benefits of Sentilla DCPM from data center monitoring to capacity planning. In the following deployment examples, Sentilla customers achieve more than 25% ROI in less than a year while using Sentilla to:
Continuously monitor metrics without
installing agents
• Monitor key metrics for each asset in the asset database, including CPU utilization, memory utilization, storage, networks, power and costs • Track trends, costs, and average/ maximum/
minimum values
• Manage system availability and load, plans for capacity, and diagnoses issues as they arise
Financially assess a new project
• Determine the best deployment option for an application before buying new equipment
• See the financial impact of virtualizing specific applications
• Benchmark public providers like Amazon or Rackspace
• Use historical data for the most accurate results
• Determine the cost impact at different utilization & performance levels • Automatically populate
historical data and Sentilla library data for known equipment models for quick analysis
• Export to a spreadsheet for further custom analysis
Evaluate new equipment purchase by helping the customer analyze the financial
impact of buying one OEM versus another
• See how a project impacts overall capacity
• Track project progress to see if it matches expected behavior • Quantify each projects return
or expense
Check the progress of a project
Synchronize with VMware
• Monitor virtual machines just like servers and storage
• Know the power impact of each virtual machine and how much it costs to operate
• Keep asset database synchronized with vCenter asset database
Find root cause of an alert condition
• See what was happening when an alert condition occurred
• Ensure thermal/environmental conditions are met
See, Analyze, Control: The High
Performance Data Center
Data center performance management drives every high performance data center to accelerate business agility. Leveraging DCPM, IT can see all of the data center resources from a single pane of glass – hardware, software, and equipment in any physical or virtual environment. DCPM generates accurate, continuous intelligence about the data center, equipping IT/data center professionals with end-to-end consumption, utilization, and cost metrics, what-if planning capability, and thereby control of the data center to anticipate any business demand shift. Only the Sentilla DCPM platform extends performance management beyond the IT infrastructure – by including the physical systems and equipment, such as environmental and HVAC systems, that affects it. Combining extensive system and equipment integrations with a patent-pending inference technology, Sentilla delivers insight into data center trends as well as granular, instant and time-series data center metrics that give IT confidence in accurately forecasting available
capacity for new projects, analyzing root causes for asset failures, low utilization or slow response times, or selecting the optimal deployment strategies for new applications. Sentilla takes the manager of managers approach to monitor and analyze data center performance, ensuring IT a unified view and complete control of the data center.
The bottom line: The velocity of dynamic business will continue to accelerate. The complexity of data center provisioning strategies will only increase. Meanwhile, the IT budget remains flat or marginally growing. Still, IT can excel by running a high performance data center within its existing budget. How? With Sentilla DCPM, IT can finally see and analyze asset-level inefficiencies and available capacity for the whole data center. IT will be in complete control of data center operations – making decisions not by guess work but based on optimized capacity and performance metrics.
About Sentilla
IT data center professionals rely on the Sentilla Data Center Performance Management (DCPM) Platform to achieve asset-level utilization intelligence across all their data center and collocation facilities. The Sentilla DCPM platform combines sophisticated performance analysis with on-going “what-if” scenarios designed to optimize capacity planning, modernization, virtualization, and power consumption initiatives. With no meters or agents to install, Sentilla’s award-winning technology
implements quickly and delivers a proven annual ROI of greater than 25 percent. Sentilla’s unified view of data center operations ensures always-on availability, cost optimizatialways-on, and calways-ontinuous performance improvement within existing data center infrastructures and budgets. Focusing on achieving the high performance data center, IT/data center professionals are best positioned to align their initiatives with critical business goals.
Sentilla Corporation
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