HP-UX Workload Manager User's Guide

Introduction
What is workload management?
Chapter 1 39
What is workload management?
System management typically focuses on monitoring the availability of
systems. While system availability is certainly important, it often
neglects the complexity of modern systems and computing environments,
such as partitioning capabilities, utility pricing resources, and clustering.
System availability also neglects the importance of the applications
themselves and of the dynamic between (1) application performance as
seen by users and (2) resource management as seen by system
administrators and investors in computer resources.
To best serve financial investments and administration costs,
applications and workloads must be consolidated on fewer servers and
resources must be dynamically allocated as needed to provide expected
performance to high-priority applications. In addition, reserve capacity
should be deployable automatically to enable customers to pay for what
they need only when they need it and to make the resources available to
workloads that have the greatest demands at that time. In clusters,
higher utilization of resources can be maintained by managing failover of
workloads among servers and partitions.
To best serve end users, an application not only must be available but
must also provide its services in a timely manner with expected and
consistent levels of performance. For example, if a task is generally
expected to complete in less than 2 seconds, but takes 15, the service to
the end user is not adequate. Thus, system and application availability
do not guarantee the timeliness of a service.