How Do I Optimize Workloads and Workflows in the Digital Workplace? (Part 2)

This is the third blog in our insights-based series dedicated to designing an IT infrastructure for the digital workplace.

The digital economy forces all industries to re-architect towards a decentralized infrastructure, enabling globally distributed workflows at centers of data exchange to remove data gravity and scale digital business.

Gartner Senior Analyst Ross Winser said, “Today’s I&O professionals must be willing to move beyond legacy practices and mindsets to embrace trends that will profoundly impact I&O teams and the capabilities they provide their business.”

So far in our series, we outlined how classic infrastructures need to evolve into a decentralized infrastructure to support a digital workplace. We also took a deep-dive into the importance of infrastructure workflows and identifying workload participants in the digital workplace.

Today, we’ll complement those insights by mapping workloads and deploying a fit for purpose footprint.

Mapping your workload performance attributes are part of a more extensive roadmap to an optimized IT infrastructure for the digital workplace. Let's take a more in-depth look into the factors that define your workloads and performance.

Defining performance attributes and planning workloads

By mapping out workloads with performance attributes, you're empowering the means to support your workload participants. Create a checklist for your workload size and profile specifics that include:

• The concurrency and messaging behaviors
• The compute and I/O dependencies
• The daily workload volumes
• The exception-based processing needs
• The response time, availability, and priority tiers
• The combination of reference with participant profile

Your workload requirements deserve careful consideration to ensure your performance targets are met in the digital workplace. A complete workload profile includes priority and performance considerations that effectively support business-critical processes.

Initiating a fit for purpose footprint deployment

So, now that we’ve optimized our workflow and workload processes, we have to match them with a fit for purpose footprint.

By moving away from centralized legacy infrastructure to a decentralized strategy, we can interconnect participants at centers of data exchange zones that enable distributed workflows within a digital workplace. You accomplish this through three primary actions:

• Aggregating profile details
• Determining the deployment strategy
• Selecting footprints

You need to establish how your workloads will be supported:

• Public?
• Private?
• Hybrid cloud?

Determine these components of your deployment:

• The scale required to support the workload profile
• The services needed to support the workload (including network and security services)
• The positioning of services (in-cloud or adjacent to the cloud)

During this stage of the digital workplace transformation process, you're seeing the depth of detail we can infuse into our new infrastructure. We've not only mapped the workflows/workloads, we've correctly identified participants, hosts, services, deployments, processes, sizes, and purposes.

After mapping the demand profile of workflows, participants, and workloads, you now have to select deployments and match the configuration of supporting footprints.

Next week, we’ll explain how to optimize your infrastructure deployment as we begin to finalize the steps for creating a digitally transformed workplace. However, if you would like to get ahead, download our Pervasive Datacenter Architecture (PDx™) Design Guide for the Digital Workplace and get the complete roadmap to infrastructure optimization in today’s digital economy.