Dan Kusnetzky, Vice President Research Operations for The 451 Group has written an interesting summary entitled “Uncorking Performance Bottlenecks”, which discusses how IT should be thinking about performance optimization. Dan points out that many business workloads today are structured as multiple services but are increasingly hosted on different physical server in a datacenter. Dan suggests that there are three phases to uncorking performance bottlenecks for IT in this scenario:

1. Design
2. Develop
3. Optimize

The article focuses on the optimization phase and specifically optimization for performance. Dan highlights four specific areas for IT to target when addressing bottlenecks and performance problems:

1. Optimizing network traffic – Dan suggests that IT should look at products that support “caching network messages, removing redundant data, management of network connections” to optimize performance.
2. Storage – IT should look to storage optimization to boost performance and reduce costs according to Dan.
3. Data management – IT should help the organization make optimal use of information resources by focusing on performance of their database engines
4. System and/or Virtual system memory – Dan points out that IT needs to ensure that their management tools are designed to address the operational characteristics of virtual machines as well as physical systems.

Finally, Dan points out that – unfortunately – a lot of organizations react to performance bottlenecks by replacing or supplementing physical hardware with newer and faster equipment. However; as the article points out, there are options to address bottlenecks other than more hardware. Dan closes directly with, “But if they [IT] had taken a bit more time and examined network, storage and memory usage, they may have gained even more performance at a lower overall cost.”

What do you think about Dan’s suggestions? Do you add more hardware at the first sign of a performance bottleneck? How do you optimize today? How are you planning to optimize in 2010?