Optimize Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure with IWO
Application resource management is a top-down, application-driven approach that continuously analyzes applications’ resource needs and generates fully automatable actions to ensure applications always get what they need to perform. It runs 24/7/365 and scales with the largest, most complex environments.
To perform application resource management, Intersight Workload Optimizer represents your environment holistically as a supply chain of resource buyers and sellers, all working together to meet application demand. By empowering buyers (VMs, instances, containers, and services) with a budget to seek the resources that applications need to perform and empowering sellers to price their available resources (CPU, memory, storage, network) based on utilization in real time, IWO keeps your environment within the desired state, with operating conditions that achieve the following conflicting goals at the same time:
• Ensured application performance: Prevent bottlenecks, upsize containers/VMs, prioritize workload, and reduce storage latency
• Efficient use of resources: Consolidate workloads to reduce infrastructure usage to the minimum, downsize containers, prevent sprawl, and use the most economical cloud offerings
IWO is a containerized, microservices-architected application running in a Kubernetes environment (or within a VM) on your network or a public cloud VPC (Virtual Private Cloud). You assign services running on your network to be IWO targets. IWO discovers the entities (physical devices, virtual components, and software components) that each target manages and then performs analysis, anticipates risks to performance or efficiency, and recommends actions you can take to avoid problems before they occur.
Intelligent, proactive workload optimization simplifies and automates operations. With many tools, the focus is on monitoring and alerting users after a problem has occurred. Cisco IWO is a proactive tool that is designed to avoid application performance issues in the first place. It continuously analyzes workload performance, costs, and compliance rules and makes recommendations on what specific actions to take to avoid issues before they happen, thus radically simplifying and improving day-to-day operations.
While some tools provide visibility into applications or visibility into an individual tier of physical or virtual infrastructure, Cisco IWO bridges all these layers with a single tool. It creates a dynamic dependency graph that visualizes the connections between application elements and infrastructure throughout the layers of the stack, all the way down to component resources within servers, networking, and storage. Figure 5-4 shows how Cisco IWO analyzes telemetry data across your hybrid cloud environment to optimize resources and reduce cost.
Figure 5-4 Cisco IWO analyzes telemetry data across your hybrid cloud environment to optimize resources and reduce cost.
Cisco IWO can optimize workloads in any infrastructure, any environment, and any cloud, and it works with the industry’s top platforms, including VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, and OpenStack. It automatically manages compute, storage, and network resources across these platforms, both on the premises and in the cloud. It analyzes telemetry data from a broad ecosystem of data center and cloud technologies, with agentless support for over 50 targets across a range of hypervisors, compute platforms (including Cisco UCS and HyperFlex), container platforms, public clouds, and more. Cisco IWO correlates these telemetry sources into a holistic view to deliver intelligent recommendations and trigger actions, including where to place workloads and how to size and scale resources.
Cisco Intersight is a cloud operations platform that delivers intelligent visualization, optimization, and orchestration for applications and infrastructure across public cloud and on-premises environments. It provides an essential control point for customers to get more value from hybrid cloud investments.
The Cisco IWO service extends these capabilities with hybrid cloud application resource management and support for a broad third-party ecosystem. With this powerful solution, you can have confidence that your applications have continuous access to the IT resources they need to perform, at the lowest cost, whether they reside on the premises or in a public cloud.
The combination of Cisco IWO and AppDynamics can break down siloes between IT teams. This integration provides a single source of truth for application and infrastructure teams to work together more effectively, avoiding finger pointing and late-night war rooms.
AppDynamics discovers and maps your business application topology and how it uses IT resources. Cisco IWO correlates this data with your infrastructure stacks to create a dynamic dependency graph of your hybrid IT environment. It analyzes supply and demand and drives workload placement and resource allocation actions in your IT environment to help ensure that application components get the computing, storage, and network resources they need. Together, these intelligent tools replace sizing guesswork with real-time analytics and modeling so that you know how much infrastructure is needed to allow your applications and business to keep pace with demand.
If you have workloads running on the premises and in public clouds, your IT teams need to make complex, on-going decisions about where to locate workloads and how to size resources in order to ensure performance and minimize cost.
Figuring out what workloads should run where is nearly impossible if you lack clear visibility into available resources and associated costs. And for workloads that run in the cloud, how do you determine what cloud instance or tier is the best fit at the lowest cost? Cloud costs can become volatile, and you can get lost in a myriad of sizing, placement, and pricing decisions that can have very expensive consequences. Cisco IWO can help in the following ways:
• Manage resource allocation and workload placement in all your infrastructure environments, giving you full-stack visibility in a single pane of glass for supply and demand across your combined on-premises and cloud estate.
• Optimize cloud costs with automated selection of instances, reserved instances (RIs), relational databases, and storage tiers based on workload consumption and optimal costs.
• Dynamically scale, delete, and purchase the right cloud resources to ensure performance at the lowest cost.
• Extend on-premises resources by continuously optimizing workload placement and cutting overprovisioning based on utilization trends.
• De-risk migrations to and from the cloud with a data-driven scenario modeling engine.
In increasingly competitive markets, more organizations are adopting containerized deployment options to deliver business-differentiating applications quickly. Kubernetes has become the de facto standard for container orchestration and helps to build, deliver, and scale applications faster. For IT teams, Kubernetes has introduced new layers of complexity with interdependencies and fluctuating demand that make it nearly impossible to effectively manage modern IT at scale.
Cisco IWO simplifies Kubernetes deployments and optimizes performance and cost in real time for on-going operations in the following ways:
• Container rightsizing: Scale container limits/requests up or down based on application demand.
• Pod “move”/rescheduling: Reschedule pods while maintaining service availability to avoid resource fragmentation and/or contention on the node.
• Cluster scaling: When Cisco IWO sees that pods have too little (or too much) capacity in a cluster, it will give the recommendation to spin up another node (or to suspend nodes).
• Container planning: Model what-if scenarios based on your real-time environment. With a few clicks, you can determine how much headroom you have in your clusters or simulate adding or removing Kubernetes pods.