Evaluating impact of manageability features on device performance

Manageability is a key design constraint for IT solutions, defined as the range of operations required to maintain and administer system resources through their lifecycle phases. Emerging complex and powerful management platforms and automation software expose new tensions — between the host and management applications, between costs and performance, and between costs and complexity. In this paper, we take a systematic approach to the evaluation of manageability workloads and define metrics for evaluating manageability efficiency. We propose the Manageability Quotient (MaQ) as a holistic measure of a system's ability to deliver guarantees on both host and management application performance while minimizing cost. We evaluate a range of host and management workloads on various manageability platforms using the metrics. Our results, based on more than 4000 experiments, provides insights on the merits and demerits of different configurations.