Modern businesses need to process ever-increasing volumes of data at ever-increasing speeds. Furthermore, they’re under increasing pressure to process this data with minimal resources.
This means that workload optimization has become a major challenge for all businesses. Leveraging colocation and/or public cloud integration can help you to meet this challenge. Here is a quick guide to what you need to know.
A workload is the amount of computing resources and time it takes to generate an outcome. Different outcomes have different characteristics and hence require different resources.
Workload optimization is the practice of allocating computing resources in a way that aligns with the specific characteristics and requirements of different workloads. To do this effectively, IT managers need to understand the factors affecting workload performance. Here is an overview of the five main ones.
Hardware specifications: Compute-intensive workloads benefit from high-performance CPUs with multiple cores and a fast clock speed. Memory-intensive tasks benefit from ample, fast RAM.
Network performance: Network-centric tasks benefit from high bandwidth and low latency. The more data is transmitted the more importance bandwidth has. The faster the application needs to respond, the more important latency is.
Storage performance: For storage-intensive workloads, utilizing high-speed storage media, such as SSDs, enhances data access times. Furthermore, the choice between direct-attached storage (DAS), network-attached storage (NAS), or storage area network (SAN) configurations influences data retrieval speeds and overall system responsiveness.
Application-specific demands: Certain applications may demand specialized hardware accelerators, optimized libraries, or specific configurations to work efficiently.
Parallelism and concurrency: Workloads that can be effectively parallelized benefit from multi-core processors, enabling simultaneous execution of tasks and reducing processing time. Optimizing for concurrency involves designing applications or workflows that efficiently distribute tasks across available resources, enhancing scalability and responsiveness.
Once you have determined what resources a workload needs to perform optimally, you then need to determine how to provide the workload with the optimum level of resources. This is complicated by the fact that, in the real world, the level of demand for a particular workload is almost certainly going to fluctuate over time.
This means that maximizing the benefits of workload optimization requires the ability to scale. This is why colocation is so useful, especially when combined with public cloud integration.
Colocation services provide data center facilities in which clients house their own equipment. The colocation service provider manages the data center infrastructure (physical and digital). Clients manage their own equipment and the data on it.
Colocation can be used to extend the capabilities on on-premises infrastructure. It is, however, increasingly used as a replacement for on-premises infrastructure. Regardless of which option you choose, colocation can boost your workload optimization efforts. Here are three, specific ways it can help.
Using colocation enables businesses to leverage horizontal scaling. That means adding and removing nodes in line with changing workloads. Businesses also have the option to implement vertical scaling. This is adding or allocating more power to existing resources. With colocation, vertical scaling can be used for dynamic adjustments. Its capabilities are, however, limited by the capabilities of the underlying resources.
Colocation facilities tend to be located near interconnection hubs and/or internet exchange points (IPXs). This means they generally have outstanding networking connectivity. Ideally, businesses will use colocation facilities located near their key user bases. Minimizing the distance that data has to travel will speed up its transmission times even further.
Colocation vendors are typically very quick to implement support for emerging/niche technologies. For example, most colocation vendors are able to support the specialist hardware requirements needed for artificial intelligence (AI) or machine learning (ML) deployments.
In the context of workload optimization, public cloud integration is generally used to extend the capabilities of private infrastructure (on-premises or colocation). Here are three, specific ways it can help.
The public cloud operates on the basis of virtualization. This means that resources can be commissioned and decommissioned with literally a few clicks. Moreover, for practical purposes, it has limitless resources. For both reasons, the public cloud is often used to deal with spikes in traffic. This is more economical than maintaining in-house infrastructure that is rarely used.
Using colocation to host services, applications, and/or data near users only makes sense in areas where there is a baseline number of users. By contrast, the public cloud can be used to serve people no matter where in the world they are.
As public clouds operate on virtualization, resources can be reconfigured just by entering the desired specifications into a dashboard. There is no need to wait for somebody to make physical changes to equipment.
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