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Across today's IT infrastructures there are Windows 2000 servers of all capacities with unused headroom running single applications. Each of these servers has associated ongoing management costs and software licensing costs that far outweigh the initial, one-time investment for the hardware. These servers were either deployed with additional growth in mind or they were deployed as fast as possible with little emphasis on sizing. Regardless, in many cases, these servers now utilize less than 30% of their compute resources. For each server, there is a cost attached to the resulting unused capacity.
The cost of unutilized resources should not be underestimated. If you consider the value that computing solutions deliver in terms of customer satisfaction and the corporation's ability to respond quickly to client demands, the untapped potential of wasted resources becomes clear. Four servers running one application each have the potential to deliver four times the business value by simply reconfiguring the servers to run more applications. More business value delivered at little or no additional cost means greater ROI for your business.
The Insight software Workload Management Pack (WMP) provides the tools you need to safely consolidate applications, maximizing business value delivered to achieve greater returns on server investments. With the WMP software, Resource Partitioning Manager v2.0, you configure resource partitions, application boundaries defined by their allocated quantity of processor and memory resources. Once partitions are configured, each application can enjoy access to specific processors and a specific memory amount, ensuring service levels consistent with those generated when the application existed on a dedicated server.
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Unused server resources are even more than lost opportunities. Every unused resource carries the additional weight of ongoing software licensing and management costs. When we tap into the unused resources in the environment, we can eliminate much of the monthly management costs in the environment, decreasing total cost of ownership. For example, using Workload Management Pack to consolidate four applications onto a single server with four resource partitions could significantly reduce both monthly management costs and OS licensing costs.
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The ability to control how server resources are allocated to applications provides opportunities beyond application consolidation. Many of today's applications seek to dominate a server's resources, gathering up as much processing power and memory as possible. For some environments, this means that applications must be quarantined - implemented on a dedicated server to ensure that the application does not starve other applications for resources. For still more environments, misbehaved applications mean frequent server reboots to reset resource allocation levels significantly reducing availability of all applications on the server.
The Insight software Workload Management Pack can dramatically improve the availability of environments with applications that are not only resource intensive, but can also be disruptive to other applications on the same server. Partitioning misbehaved applications and limiting those applications to the resources within their respective partitions protects other applications from their destructive nature. In addition, application reboots required when resources are depleted do not have to affect the entire server; the partition with the destructive application can be automatically restarted without affecting other partitions.
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The Insight software Workload Management Pack offers even more than control over how resources are allocated. The Workload Management Pack also gives you control over when resources are allocated. To deliver the greatest value to customers, IT environments must be flexible; they must be able to handle unanticipated requests for resources. Each resource partition has rules associated with it. These rules enable changes to the partition size based on utilization or time of day. In the event that criteria are met, the dynamic rules engine makes configuration changes as defined in the rules, delivering resources where they are needed, when they are needed, without manual intervention. Access to additional resources at all times means consistent application performance and consistent service levels for your customers.
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