Virtualized and private cloud infrastructures are all about sharing resources – compute, storage and network. Optimizing these environments comes down to the ability to properly balance capacity supply and application demand. In practical terms, this means allocating the right amount of resources and putting workloads in the right places. These decisions are critical to ensuring performance, compliance and cost control.
Yet most organizations are using antiquated methods such as home-grown spreadsheets and best guesses to determine which infrastructure to host workloads on and how much capacity to allocate. Not only do these approaches hinder operational agility, but as hosting decisions become more and more complex, they are downright dangerous. The typical strategy employed to stave off risk is to over-provision infrastructure, and the thinking behind this is that having an excess of capacity on hand will ensure that enough resource is available to avoid any performance problems. This is not only expensive, but it actually doesn’t prevent key operational issues and many of the performance and compliance issues that are caused by incorrectly combining workloads.