Matt That IT Guy

Racking And Stacking In A Cloud-Based World

Tech Field Day

Tech Field Day 14 Primer: Turbonomic

Turbonomic LogoTurbonomic (formerly known as VMTurbo) will be making their sixth appearance at a Tech Field Day event come Tech Field Day 14. So what does Turbonomic do? To the casual observer, they might just seem like another performance monitoring and reporting tool, however, that would be a gross understatement and a large injustice.

Turbonomic, founded in 2009, has appeared on the Inc. 500 which is a list of some of the fastest growing companies. In 2016 they achieved a 3-year growth of %954, which is quite impressive, to say the least. So what has been the cause of all this growth? To put it simply: desired state.

DESIRED STATE

According to Turbonomic, the desired state is that “sweet spot” between efficiency and performance. You can take a look at any real-world workload, regardless of size, and you can see tradeoffs between efficiency and performance. It might be a matter of CPU contention on an ESXi host because you can’t justify adding another host to the cluster. Similarly, it might be a matter of having to one host running just a single VM because you can’t find a “fit” for it elsewhere.

This is where Turbonomic steps in; like a lot of traditional tools, it starts off by watching your environment. It’ll keep track of usage patterns such as heavy CPU usage, what machines consistently use all their RAM (and is it enough), which machines rarely use all their RAM, etc. Within a short period of time, you’ll start to see recommendations such as “move VM XYZ to host ABC”. You can even take the hands-off approach and let Turbonomic take care of implementing those changes for you.

Turbonomic Supported TechnologiesSo what can you do with this? Because you have a centralized system that not only monitors performance but also consistently implements changes to keep your environment in tip-top shape, you can now provide performance SLAs for your applications in a very hands-off approach. The icing on the cake is that you can also monitor and manage public cloud, such as AWS, as well as deploy new templates as part of a remediation. There is actually a fairly impressive list of technologies that Turbonomic supports. You can find the full list on their site.

HELPING ORGANIZATIONS SAVE MONEY

As with just about any tech company out there, Turbonomic touts having a good return on invest, however, in their case I can see it being fairly easy to prove that. Given how their product works, you can get the optimal use out of your existing infrastructure and not overspend on unneeded resources. Through their planning tool, you can order your additional hardware “just in time”, and as most tech prices are constantly dropping, the longer you can hold off ordering, the better the price. Lastly, with their deployment tool, getting those new resources into the pool will allow you to get to the desired state while minimizing effort.

I’m looking forward to seeing what Turbonomic will be presenting at Tech Field Day 14. Hopefully, we’ll see some of the “behind the scenes” magic that is used to figure out how to achieve the desired state. You can catch the live stream over at TechFieldDay.com on May 11th and 12th 2017.

Disclaimer: I was invited to participate in Tech Field Day as a delegate. All of my expenses, including food, transportation, and lodging are being covered by Gestalt IT. I did not receive any compensation to write this post, nor was I requested to write this post. Anything written above was on my own accord.

Extra Bonus Disclaimer: Turbonomic is a sponsor on this site, however I was not requested or paid to write this post, nor was I requested to write this post. Anything written above was on my own accord.

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