This is the first reaction for most of the organisation against a performance issue. As hardware becoming cheaper day by day the first reaction was to add more hardware.
There are two issues: First the TCO of adding hardware is much higher then the hardware cost itself, if we include services, space and software licensing cost. Second blindly throwing more hardware does not solve performance issue sometimes it make the matter wrorse. In a classic case a mid tier corporations tried to solve their performance problem by adding couple of more CPU to their enterprise servers. To everybody’s surprise the performance of the application got degraded. The server was connected to an enterprise storage subsystem. As the server get upgraded it send more request to the back end disk subsystem, and queues build up in storage system and the response time of the disk subsystem increased and as a result the entire applications response time got increased. A Virtual infrastructure model could have saved the corporation from spending half a million dollars. They could have done ‘what if’ scenario’s in the model itself before actually investing in the hardware.
There are two issues: First the TCO of adding hardware is much higher then the hardware cost itself, if we include services, space and software licensing cost. Second blindly throwing more hardware does not solve performance issue sometimes it make the matter wrorse. In a classic case a mid tier corporations tried to solve their performance problem by adding couple of more CPU to their enterprise servers. To everybody’s surprise the performance of the application got degraded. The server was connected to an enterprise storage subsystem. As the server get upgraded it send more request to the back end disk subsystem, and queues build up in storage system and the response time of the disk subsystem increased and as a result the entire applications response time got increased. A Virtual infrastructure model could have saved the corporation from spending half a million dollars. They could have done ‘what if’ scenario’s in the model itself before actually investing in the hardware.
