How Automated IT Resource Optimization Supports Predictable Business Outcomes
Evolving Solutions consulting and Turbonomic Application Resource Management for IBM Cloud Paks can help optimize resources and costs for your applications
Organizations are dealing with an unprecedented level of change and disruption. Global and local events are putting new pressures on their ability to grow, compete and even survive. An agile, flexible IT environment that can adapt to different priorities is an essential foundation for succeeding in this environment.
At Evolving Solutions, our primary focus is understanding clients’ business or technology challenges and then helping them identify and implement a solution that best fits their needs. Although adapting to change and optimizing IT performance and cost can be complex, we help our clients through this process by providing best practices and clear guidance that matches their business priorities and technology landscapes.
This blog will cover our unique approach to helping clients optimize infrastructure and cloud capabilities, along with how IBM Turbonomic Application Resource Management for IBM Cloud Paks fits into this process.
Identifying Target Capabilities and Outcomes
Whether we are helping a client select, implement, or operationalize an optimization solution, the choice ultimately ties back to the operational capabilities they are trying to build. In our experience, challenges in selecting a solution are typically process related rather than technology based. Adopting a new tool to solve an operational problem must start with understanding the problem and addressing the skills and processes that go with it.
Implementing a technology solution that fits your needs can help solve the problem. But you also must ask the following questions, to fully address the challenges your organization is facing:
- What operational capabilities and business outcomes am I trying to achieve?
- What people and processes surround these capabilities and outcomes?
- Do I need to think about how I am taking in work differently?
- Do I have the right number of people and the sufficient skills aligned with what I am trying to deliver back to the business or my end users?
Our services work to fine-tune processes that can help you gather information to answer the questions listed above.
Transforming Infrastructure and Application Data Into Business Optimizations
In addition to relying on our operations expertise, we recommend leveraging a solution like IBM Turbonomic Application Resource Management for IBM Cloud Paks—a particularly useful tool for optimizing your IT environment for a variety of objectives. Turbonomic analyzes operational data from your environment to help your organization:
- Improve performance
- Optimize capacity
- Achieve cost and utilization targets
The real benefit of Turbonomic lies in the flexibility to optimize for different processes. It takes information in from a monitoring or observability tool, and based on that information, allows you to make choices or identify changes you would like to make in your environment. In essence, Turbonomic helps transform end data into outcome-based recommendations and optimizations for your business.
An excellent example of this is the challenges posed by constrained hardware availability. Turbonomic can evaluate information gathered from your environment and optimize the placement of workloads, both within your data center and a public cloud, to free up capacity. It also provides the option to reallocate workloads as demand changes, further increasing the amount of usable infrastructure for your use when additional hardware isn’t an option.
A user can also identify key business outcomes, and Turbonomic will provide insights on how to achieve those outcomes. For example, if you are looking to improve performance, Turbonomic can analyze data from your organization’s monitoring tools to identify changes you need to make to achieve performance gains. Or, if you are looking to reduce cost by reducing your number of servers or allocation for cloud spend, you can use Turbonomic to optimize against those target outcomes.
Turbonomic relies on data collected from your monitoring systems, crunching existing data, analyzing it, and using it in a way that helps optimize your environment. Once Turbonomic creates those outcome-based insights, it either feeds the information to a user who will then make manual changes or goes directly to a tool that can make an automatic change in the environment.
Optimizing IT Operations to Meet Business Goals
Our current business environment provides many unique challenges for an IT organization. That is why identifying target business outcomes and operational capabilities is so important during the decision-making process. Evolving Solutions can help you identify the criteria you need to select a software package that meets your business goals.
Contact Evolving Solutions to learn more about Turbonomic Application Resource Management for IBM Cloud Paks and how we can help you get started.
