Organizations are more dependent upon their IT infrastructure than ever before as they continue to implement their digital transformation initiatives. Without the right resources in place to manage application workloads, it can be difficult to meet customer demand while simultaneously providing an outstanding user experience. When evaluating their infrastructure options, organizations must strike a careful balance between meeting their existing needs and ensuring that they can accommodate future goals.
In part one of this two-part series, we’ll take a closer look at the role of scalability in IT strategy and look at the technical benefits (and drawbacks) of the two primary models for scaling capacity. In part two, we’ll focus on how choosing the right infrastructure partner can help you maximize your growth potential while minimizing downtime, performance, and security risks.
Scalability is a foundational computing concept that refers to an IT system or application’s ability to handle increasing workloads or demand without a significant decrease in performance or functionality. In other words, a system capable of scaling can adapt to changing demands without experiencing downtime, crashes, or other performance issues. Scalability can be achieved through a variety of means, but it is crucial in modern computing as businesses and organizations often require systems that can handle fluctuating workloads, data volumes, and users.
A straightforward example of scalability is an eCommerce business that experiences a surge in traffic during peak seasons, such as the weekend after Thanksgiving (including Black Friday and Cyber Monday). If its IT infrastructure is not scalable, the business may experience downtime or system crashes during peak demand, leading to lost sales, frustrated customers, and damage to its reputation. With scalable resources in place, however, the company can easily handle the increased traffic by provisioning additional processing and bandwidth to ensure its website and services remain responsive and available to customers. This can result in a positive customer experience, increased sales, and a stronger reputation for the business. As such, scalability is crucial for businesses to remain competitive and successful in the long run.
Having scalable infrastructure in place is crucial for a growing organization because it allows the business to adapt to changing needs, increasing workloads, and other demands without compromising performance or functionality. As a company grows, it needs more IT resources to support application workloads, data volumes, users, and other requirements. Without scalability, it could face performance issues, downtime, or other technical problems that can impact its productivity, revenue, and reputation.
But scalability isn’t always about growth. Flexible infrastructure also provides the ability to scale down capacity when resources are no longer needed, which can help save money and reduce the costs associated with unused or unnecessary resources. This is especially true for businesses that operate on a pay-per-use model, where costs are directly linked to resource consumption. In addition to cost benefits, scaling down capacity is also important for security considerations. Unused or unnecessary resources can pose a security threat, especially if they are not properly maintained or secured. Scaling down capacity helps to minimize the potential attack surface and improve security posture.
Horizontal scaling, also known as scale-out architecture, is a method of scaling systems or applications by simply adding more resources (typically servers). This involves several technical steps to ensure that the new resources can be integrated with the existing infrastructure and work together to increase capacity.
When new assets are added to the infrastructure, they need to be provisioned and configured to work with the existing servers or nodes. This includes setting up the operating system, installing necessary software and applications, and configuring network settings to ensure that the new server or node can communicate with the existing infrastructure.
Once the new server or node is set up, it needs to be integrated with the existing infrastructure to distribute the workload. Load balancing techniques are typically used to manage workloads across multiple servers or nodes based on availability and capacity. The load balancer can be a hardware device or software application that distributes workloads according to predefined rules or dynamic algorithms.
To ensure that the new resources are being used effectively, applications and services must be designed to operate efficiently in a distributed environment. This requires developing them in a manner that enables the management of multiple instances running across different servers or nodes. Additionally, these applications and services must be capable of handling potential communication failures and network latency issues that may arise between equipment.
Horizontal scaling strategies provide a number of benefits to organizations:
While horizontal scalability provides several benefits, it can also come with a few potential downsides:
Vertical scaling, also known as scale-up architecture, is a method of scaling computer systems or applications by adding more resources to a single server or node. Vertical scaling works by upgrading the capabilities of existing hardware assets to handle more workload or perform more efficiently.
There are a few common methods of scaling systems vertically:
Once the resources are upgraded, the server or node needs to be reconfigured to ensure that the upgraded resources are properly integrated into the infrastructure. This can include updating the operating system, installing new software or applications, and configuring network settings to ensure that the upgraded asset can communicate with the existing equipment and applications.
Applications may need to be reconfigured to take advantage of the newly available computing resources. In some instances, the application code may need to be optimized.
Taking an upgrade-based vertical scaling approach can provide several benefits:
While vertical scaling provides a number of immediate benefits, it also has a few potential drawbacks, especially over the long term:
While horizontal and vertical scaling offer two distinct paths to increasing IT capacity, they don’t have to be mutually exclusive choices. That’s especially true now thanks to the availability of cloud computing platforms and colocation environments that offer tremendous flexibility when it comes to capacity planning and resource management.
In part two, we’ll look at how a hybrid IT strategy that incorporates data center colocation and cloud engineering allows organizations to leverage the benefits of both scalability models while minimizing (or even eliminating) the impact of their known disadvantages.
If you’re ready to explore your infrastructure options right away, talk to one of our experienced solutions engineers to learn how Evoque Data Center Solutions can put you on a path to sustainable IT growth.