“Higher system performance—the traditional hallmark of UNIX evolution—is still critical, but no longer sufficient. New systems must deliver higher levels of performance plus availability plus efficiency. We call this Performance plus.” —Ross A. Mauri, general manager, IBM System p
While more AIX-centric than I would've hoped for from an article for System p, I did see an interesting article from an IBM Systems Magazine which touches on some of the challenges emerging for performance teams in today's marketplace. The article focuses on application availability and energy efficiencies as appropriate parallel focus items in addition to performance metrics and benchmarks. No surprise there, but it is interesting to see IBM's senior executives emerging with a new term - "Performance Plus" - which generally means we'll be living that as a mantra within a month or two.
The challenge comes in emerging with new metrics to numerically quantify the balancing act of system/application availability, energy usage (across cooling, power draw, and peak energy demands), increasingly virtualized servers, and the classic how fast does my application run?
If we could figure out how to make "metrics" a series of coding requests in open-source projects, we could get things going across various mailing lists and get more people cranking out code, ideas, and brand-new metrics. In the meantime, I guess we'll start getting more creative with our Linux brethren world-wide who are working on exactly all of these issues in real-life scenarios. The balancing act is already in progress, the metrics will need to emerge over time.
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