IT organizations often use four elements – size, complexity, economic value and availability – to effectively deploy and manage today’s complex workloads. The simple definition of a workload– defined as the amount of processing needed at any given time–has greatly evolved in recent years. In Part I , we discussed considerations for deploying a typical application workload.
Now that we have our collaboration workloads in place for our Exchange environment let’s consider how our workload evolves. In the case of the Exchange application and associated workload, an initial deployment is often completed that supports the organization’s existing needs. But for many organizations, three key factors affect the overall success of the application and workload in question.
- Increasing demand for applications and IT services – Collaboration workloads like our example have a certain amount of variability. New users are added or deleted, new teams are formed, and moves occur departmentally or geographically.
- Increased complexity of workload management – Every change in Exchange service affects the four elements of the workload that we established earlier putting IT operations teams in a difficult position. To ensure the workload is running properly on the underlying infrastructure can increase administration costs.
- Inflexible infrastructure responds slowly – According to Gartner, a leading analyst group, organizations have virtualized 40% of their infrastructure and are planning to virtualize 60% of new workloads. Despite this rapid adoption we find most organizations have a legacy physical infrastructure, which can limit agility and flexibility.
Dell enables organizations to leverage existing infrastructure to improve the delivery of applications and IT services across mixed physical and virtual environments. Customers are achieving dramatic results by being better able to:
- Drive increased business agility and deliver IT as-a-service
- Increase automation and enable rapid workload deployment
- Optimize converged infrastructure and operations across physical and virtual environments
With VIS, Dell is helping customer balance the need for greater agility, while gaining efficiency and balancing the economics of on-premise private clouds and off-premise public cloud options. Additionally Dell offers vStart for Dell Private Cloud. The solution enables greater business agility through pre-integrated infrastructure and automated self-service delivery. Combining servers, storage, networking and cloud management software, organizations can eliminate long, drawn-out processes of architecting, building and integrating virtual infrastructure. Together Dell’s VIS and vStart solutions are helping customers balance workload attributes across size, complexity, economic value, and availability by helping them focus on their business, not on building infrastructure or taking on added administration costs.
The life of a workload isn’t glamorous and can create many challenges for IT. From initial planning through deployment and management, ensuring resiliency in the face of growth and change can lead to increased costs and slow response to the business.
Through Dell PowerEdge 12th generation servers, VIS and vStart solutions, and Enterprise Workload Solutions, Dell is delivering innovations to propel business success. Dell has listened to our customers and is focused on empowering workloads and IT operations with the agility and operational efficiency needed to deliver at the speed of today’s business.