Illuminata (Gordon Haff): Horses for Courses: Optimizing for Workloads
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(0)Overview: The title refers to a British phrase about horses performing well in certain weather or on certain tracks. Gordon extends this thought to other industries and shows that a “one size fits all” approach has met with suspicion and skepticism over the years.
He then provides a brief history of BI, OLTP, web services, and distributed content systems, each with particular performance and resource characteristics.
Gordon finds common threads among different workloads when matching workloads to systems. The common architectural elements spanning these workload types are virtualization, high-speed fabrics, accelerators, and system and service management.
Gordon cites IBM’s “Smart Traffic” work, dissecting it to show the variety of system requirements integrated into this solution.
Next, he examines OLTP, BI and network-facing workloads and their varying system requirements. Gordon details IBM’s Smart Analytics Optimizer, citing it as a good example of a workload-optimized system.
He wraps up the report by showing that today’s systems’ versatility and IT’s unquenchable thirst for computing are forces behind the shift toward tailoring system selection and design to specific workloads.
