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10 Considerations for Achieving Optimal Workload Placement

The IT industry is becoming increasingly complex, making it harder than ever to optimize costs and workload performance. When workloads are in the wrong place, organizations can waste money and valuable resources without even realizing it.

To help achieve optimal workload placement for your company, consider these 10 key factors as you navigate this complicated process.

Key Takeaways:

IT decision-makers need to consider both upfront and continual costs for the cloud platforms where they place their workloads.
Compatibility is another key factor as it affects how workloads interact with the framework, network, automation solutions and more.
Security and disaster response measures are just as important as anything else, as system downtime is certainly anything but optimal.

What you need to consider for optimal workload placement

If your company is embracing the latest advancements in cloud technology, you might already be operating in a hybrid multicloud environment. According to Grand View Research, the multicloud management market size was valued at USD 8.03 billion in 2022, with a projected compound annual growth rate of 28% from 2023 to 2030. As more organizations are expanding their IT across multiple clouds, the question of how to optimally place workloads becomes a more common one.

1. Licensing Costs

When evaluating optimal workload placement, IT leaders must consider which cloud location is most effective in terms of cost and performance. Each cloud provider varies in terms of physical proximity to your end-users, availability, and compatibility with your existing IT environment.

Additionally, each cloud platform also has licensing costs you must pay in order to continue using the service, which may make or break your decision to place apps and data there.

2. Ongoing Costs

In addition to licensing fees, which may either come in the form of an upfront payment or a subscription model, there are also ongoing costs associated with adopting a new cloud platform.

For example, some cloud providers might bundle a suite of other cloud services with your purchase that also requires continuous payment. It is important to calculate how all of these ongoing costs will affect your business in the future, and if you project that they might break the bank, consider placing workloads elsewhere.

3. Workload Sizing

Right-sizing is practically synonymous with being optimal in the IT space. With a tool like Nutanix Sizer, you can produce precise solution planning recommendations for any cloud-based project. Achieve optimal workload placement by calculating the maximum workload density at a specified cloud location and utilizing that cloud’s resources to the fullest.

4. Interoperability

Compatibility issues often arise when moving workloads between different cloud environments. Nutanix Cloud Clusters (NC2) facilitates interoperability by granting a bird’s-eye view of your entire cloud environment, helping you identify and address integration needs. NC2 can even extend your on-premises environment to the cloud without the need for refactoring or replatforming your apps and workloads.

5. Backup and Disaster Recovery

No cloud or datacenter is completely immune to disasters and disruptions. Therefore, evaluating a cloud provider’s backup and disaster recovery measures is crucial before entrusting them with your valuable data. Ensuring business continuity is a significant factor in optimal workload placement, as you need to be able to quickly restore applications and services after a disaster.

6. Security

Even though some disasters are unavoidable, cloud providers must not compromise on security. Effective cloud security must protect a large distributed ecosystem of data locations, ideally with a centralized model that allows administrators to deploy policies, solutions, and protective measures to the entire network without delay.

7. Cloud Framework

As a broader consideration, it is important to carefully analyze a location’s cloud framework. The intricacies of the underlying infrastructure can cause unforeseen complications, especially if the workloads or the infrastructure itself have dependencies that the other side does not satisfy. This goes hand-in-hand with the concept of interoperability but can cause further issues if the framework is incapable of accommodating the push toward an increasingly cloud-native future.

8. Automation

It is often the case in IT that optimal workload placement is less about how the workload can capitalize on the location and more about how the location can optimize the workload. A platform built for cloud automation can assume the burden of managing resources, setting up virtual machines, and deploying workloads.

Nutanix Cloud Manager is an example of a unified solution that provides automated optimization through automatic anomaly alerts. Codeless task automation is another feature, allowing IT teams to seamlessly improve productivity with little to no coding knowledge.

9. Networking

When you place an application in a cloud location, the entire network where that location exists becomes a factor in the application’s performance. The network is a resource and one that your workloads need to be able to tap into without unnecessary complications getting in the way. A cloud provider’s ability to meet your networking needs and satisfy your other IT resource requirements will lead your thought process toward the best workload placement destination.

10. License Portability

License portability is perhaps the most important consideration for achieving optimal workload placement, and yet it is one that often goes overlooked. Nutanix Cloud Platform supports full license portability by design, making it possible to deploy Nutanix licenses on any supported server-based datacenter or public cloud platform. With this, Nutanix strives to remove vendor lock-in from the equation and provides you with full flexibility when it comes to delivering software as needed, where needed.

Achieve Optimal Workload Placement With Nutanix

A common pitfall among IT teams is taking the “set-and-forget” approach to workload placement. Optimization is an ongoing challenge, but Nutanix ensures you can tackle it.

With Nutanix hybrid multicloud, you can migrate workloads to the optimal cloud locations 60% faster than if you use traditional application refactoring methods. This speed is everything when you are working to stay optimal at all times.

Optimal workload placement is the tip of the iceberg that is IT optimization and cost management. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you grasp this for your company.

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