What are some benefits of continuous real-time placement of user workloads?

Continuous real-time placement of user workloads is one part of a bigger puzzle involving how companies make sure systems can handle the demands that are placed on them. Autonomic systems help to automate these types of placement in order to make sure resources are available to handle tasks that are assigned to virtual machines or other components of a virtualized network structure.

The major benefit of continuous real-time placement in autonomic systems is the provisioning of resources for virtual machines and workloads that are not labor-intensive for human decision-makers.

Think about a larger set of data centers administrated by a human team. There are demands on the system 24/7, and often dynamic situations where systems have to scale or anticipate peak input/output times.

By placing workloads in real time, autonomic systems allow for proper scaling without human intervention. These systems consider the assignment of virtual machines to specific hosts, and can change this assignment to calibrate systems in an automatic way. This alone is extremely helpful to the human teams who can avoid being tied up with this type of administrative busywork throughout a day or week. The same autonomic systems will apply the same principles to provisioning CPU and memory.

Without this kind of automated placement and analysis, human teams are kept busy managing dynamic needs. They may be frustrated by the need to always be analyzing systems and adding or moving resources. With autonomic systems that provide continuous real-time placement, much of that work is done behind the scenes, or at least presented in a way that makes administration less labor-intensive.

A further benefit is that these systems can effectively deal with latency in real time. This type of workload placement often responds to congestion or bottlenecks in the system. If a particular set of virtual machines start seeing a spike in traffic, the system will automatically shift the resources without having to alert human decision-makers.

The benefits of these systems have to do with saving time and effort, as well as planning better for scaling. These are helpful in both short-term and long-term development – short-term, they can help a firm with what would otherwise be major IT emergencies. Long-term, they can help the company plan in a more confident and informed way.