After establishing our baseline reports and successfully implementing power management, we were ready to tune our Useful Work™ engine.  The Useful Work engine is what NightWatchman® Server Edition uses to review the processes running on a machine to tell if it is just looking busy, or if it is busy doing work deemed useful by the company.

To tune the Useful Work engine, any organization engaged with 1E would choose processes that are not useful or productive, specific to its business. NightWatchman Server Edition measures the productivity of a machine differently based on the information supplied.  For example, consider server backups:  they are necessary to the business, but not actually considered Useful Work by definition – especially if that is the only work your server is doing.

The Useful Work tuning can help determine when the server is able to go into Drowsy Server ® mode, as there are some activities you may elect to favour performance over power savings from CPU throttling.  Tuning also determines the recommendations the tool will provide around virtualization and decommissioning in the summary report.

The CSC and 1E teams gathered a collection of reports, which were required to interpret the data that was reported back from the servers. This was done so as to customize the  Useful Work engine to best report on CSC’s activities.  Out of the box, NightWatchman Server Edition is fairly conservative.  The 1E team gave us a list of recommendations for tuning, based on our reports.  Accepted processes included  IBM Director and Windows Setup routines. In this case, we also chose to not tune out NetBackup and ArcServe processes due to the sensitivity of the servers selected for our pilot.

After tuning our Useful Work engine, we re-ran our reports.  The findings of these reports will be in our next and final blog.  Stay tuned!