Too many servers not enough eyes - where did all these servers come from? (2 of 9)

Many distributed environments have hundreds or thousands of servers, not dozens. And some applications, or suites of applications, have dozens of servers.

Many environments have large clusters, or pools, of servers for added computing power, failover, or load balancing purposes.

Data centers now have hundreds, or thousands of employees, charged with writing homegrown applications, administering server farms, and managing projects of increasing complexity.

I recently worked in an environment with almost a thousand distributed servers, with about 75% of those in the production tier.

At least 300 of those servers are various flavors of Unix, with the rest being various releases of Microsoft Windows.

Many of the applications in that environment are distributed across multiple tiers, including the mainframe, and many of the applications are complex, web-based applications that require a lot of specialized knowledge to administer.

So, considering the huge increase in the number of servers and the increasing complexity of the distributed applications, the number of analysts responsible for daily reporting, analysis, and capacity planning changed as well.

Indeed, the number decreased – from 5 to 4. Instead of each analyst being responsible for about ten servers, each analyst was responsible for hundreds of servers and dozens of applications.

Even with report automation, today’s analysts are not able to dedicate full days to analyzing performance data considering the number of systems and applications. So even though detailed performance reports are automated in large environments, in many cases customer complaints and telephone calls from perplexed system administrators are the catalysts for detailed analyses.

Undetected problems such as memory leaks and looping processes can lurk for weeks or months until these issues manifest as response time or throughput issues noticeable by the end-users.

Once called, the performance analyst can drill down and find the problem within minutes, but that doesn’t help keep the problem from occurring.

The disconnect between the data center and the business units still exists in many environments, and is most frequently and best seen in reports that are prepared for management.

More to come on wednesday - keep following.....

To download the full version of this blog visit http://www.metron-athene.com/_downloads/_documents/papers/too_many_servers.pdf

Rich Fronheiser
Consultant