High-Performance IT Services

I PERFORMANCE PRINCIPLES AND COMPONENTS

Performance work often frightens people because of the apparent complexity of today’s environment—virtualization, clouds, redundant array of independent disks (RAID), big data, and so on. If you think about it, these entities are really abstractions on top of physical entities that are understood. Just as all the apparent bewildering substances we see around us are all made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons, similarly, all IT systems are made up of the basic blocks we have always known about—CPUs, disks, tapes, memory, and so on. These are often amenable to calculations and modeling.

In the 1970s, in north England, a customer was experiencing several performance problems with his applications and decided ...