Using architecture-level performance models as resource profiles for enterprise applications

Abstract

The rising energy and hardware demand is a growing concern in enterprise data centers. It is therefore desirable to limit the hardware resources that need to be added for new enterprise applications (EA). Detailed capacity planning is required to achieve this goal. Otherwise, performance requirements (i.e. response time, throughput, resource utilization) might not be met. This paper introduces resource profiles to support capacity planning. These profiles can be created by EA vendors and allow evaluating energy consumption and performance of EAs for different workloads and hardware environments. Resource profiles are based on architecture-level performance models. These models allow to represent performance-relevant aspects of an EA architecture separately from the hardware environment and workload. The target hardware environment and the expected workload can only be specified by EA hosts and users respectively. To account for these distinct responsibilities, an approach is introduced to adapt resource profiles created by EA vendors to different hardware environments. A case study validates this concept by creating a resource profile for the SPECjEnterprise2010 benchmark application. Predictions using this profile for two hardware environments match energy consumption and performance measurements with an error of mostly below 15%.