How Turbonomic works

To keep your infrastructure in the desired state, Turbonomic performs Application Resource Management. This is an ongoing process that solves the problem of assuring application performance while simultaneously achieving the most efficient use of resources and respecting environment constraints to comply to business rules.

This is not a simple problem to solve. Application Resource Management has to consider many different resources and how they are used in relation to each other, and numerous control points for each resource. As you grow your infrastructure, the factors for each decision increase exponentially. Moreover, the environment is constantly changing — to stay in the desired state, you are constantly trying to hit a moving target.

To perform Application Resource Management, Turbonomic models the environment as a market made up of buyers and sellers. These buyers and sellers make up a supply chain that represents tiers of entities in your inventory. This supply chain represents the flow of resources from the datacenter, through the physical tiers of your environment, into the virtual tier and out to the cloud. By managing relationships between these buyers and sellers, Turbonomic provides closed-loop management of resources, from the datacenter, through to the application.

See Supply Chain of Entities for a visual layout of the buyer and seller relationships.

Turbonomic uses Virtual Currency to give a budget to buyers and assign cost to resources. This virtual currency assigns value across all tiers of your environment, making it possible to compare the cost of application transactions with the cost of space on a disk or physical space in a data center.

The price that a seller charges for a resource changes according to the seller’s supply. As demand increases, prices increase. As prices change, buyers and sellers react. Buyers are free to look for other sellers that offer a better price, and sellers can duplicate themselves (open new storefronts) to meet increasing demand. Turbonomic uses its Economic Scheduling Engine to analyze the market and make these decisions. The effect is an invisible hand that dynamically guides your IT infrastructure to the optimal use of resources.

To get the most out of Turbonomic, you should understand how it models your environment, the kind of analysis it performs, and the desired state it works to achieve.