Performance As A Service™ – What is the differentiator?
When you hear someone say that we sell “Performance As A Service™ (PAAS)”, it will probably make you wonder, what one means by it. What kind of performance is being provided and at what level? Is this infrastructure related? Which Information Technology layers does it apply to? How do we ensure that you gain performance? How does it work? What do you need to do to get it?
With all the buzz words floating around in the current IT environment, Performance As A Service™ may sound as if this is purely related to the cloud based infrastructure, but in fact these services can work for both your private datacenters, colo and cloud based infrastructure. The idea behind Performance As A Service™, is to provide managed performance analytics services in a very hands-off manner so that the infrastructure resource utilization heat can be brought down in a pro-active manner and help everyone sleep better by reducing the number of fires that all of us deal with in a reactive manner. We expect that a pro-active approach like this can reduce reactive events by 80%.
Now, there are traditional OEM tools (if affordable) that can be used to help you manage your infrastructure. The main issue though is that these tools are mostly there to help you figure out the performance issue that you are dealing with right now, after the fact. The assumption here is that the OEM tool has been setup properly, still in working condition and there are right types of resources and skills available to troubleshoot the performance problem with your business user breathing down your neck. Most performance problem symptoms first appear at the user level, which then brings up the question on where to start. Additionally, the OEM tools have limited scope, which means that multiple tools are needed to help troubleshoot and manage the diverse multi-vendor environment.
Many tools claim to provide some level of pro-active performance and capacity planning monitoring, but again the assumption is that the users or administrators know how to configure and use the tool on an ongoing basis. For most part this feature generates a lot of noise that the systems and storage administrators learn to ignore. Moreover most of this need a SLA based management that is properly documented and applied to the operational environment.
Enter, Performance As A Service™, an expert inclusive, cloud based multi-layered, multi-dimension, multi-feature approach with almost zero local resource requirements on ongoing basis. Once the performance data is gathered locally and uploaded to the cloud, we do the rest. The engine for this approach is the Perfonics™ tool set that provides the back-bone of the Performance As A Service™ services. A batch mode tool that can provide baseline performance analytics horizontally across storage or systems layer across the enterprise or end-to-end vertically for specific applications. The Performance SME guides the whole process, provides summarized issue lists and actionable recommendations. The back-end team provides customizations, if needed. What is more, once the remediation is done, a post analysis provides the new baselines.
The nice thing about this hands-off model is that the same data can now be pivoted in different ways to help provide Capacity Planning As A Service™, Migration Planning, Disaster Recovery Audits, Consolidation Modeling, Optimization analysis, end to end visualizations etc. The reason this can be done is that the service collects Performance, Configuration and Capacity data at the same time.
Let us know your comments and questions. Does this type of service makes sense to you?
Perfonics™, Performance As A Service™, Capacity Planning As A Service™ are Trademarks of Interscape Technologies Inc. Click here for more information.
Alok Jain