Back to the blog. Currently on holiday, currently working at an investment bank, designing new solutions for a new IT/Application approach to capacity management.
Capacity Management, when mismanaged, can be like a deponent verb: active in form, but passive in meaning.
Why?
The tail-off in CPU speed will have to change the way applications are written, implemented, and run. It is also revolutionising capacity management, though nobody has noticed it yet.
Why?
Simple: most applications are written with an assumption that CPU speed and compiler quality will fix up application speed. Memory is cheap, CPU's cheaper, cache for no cash. Furthermore, there has been a move from tightly-coupled processor/operating system computing to a 'one size fits all' approach.
For example, why was the combination of Tru64 UNIX and DEC Alpha processors so effective in the past, and why is the combination of AIX and Power7 so effective today? Answer: if one has a common organisation/engineers controlling the CPU and the OS, then the OS can be tuned to the CPU layer: system service calls can use architectural-specific instructions for speed.
The price to pay for this is cost. Cost of development and cost of implementation. Specialist OS/CPU combinations have to make life attractive for third-parties to develop software. That is why Oracle keeps on supporting IBM's AIX platform. If life becomes unattractive for the third-party, then support is pulled. Ask HP: to lose one vendor (Microsoft) for IA64 Itanium chipset is a happenstance. To lose Oracle as well is more than a coincidence.
So what about 'one size fits all'. Well, in beginning, there was NT (x86 and x64 (DEC Alpha), then we have Windows 2008 x86, x86_64 (AMD extensions) and x64 (IA64 for now, but not Windows 201x). For UNIX, we have Linux and Solaris x86_64 flying the flag for cheaper hardware.
BUT...
The price you pay for running on Industry Standard Architecture (ISA) is Industry Standard Performance for your non-industry standard applications.
Who has the IT lion's share of the budget outside public sector: answer - banking.
Who has the worst applications? Banks. What do I mean by 'worst' - written to tight dealines, fuctionilty over performance engineering. What happens when that application is chucked over the wall to production - onto the next version. Production has the issue of making sure the application doesn't fall over.
Well, Industry standard hardware + applications written to fill a gap in the market = trouble.
In future posts, I will go into some more detail on this...
