IBM Turbonomic Glossary

The Repository is component of the Turbonomic platform that stores source topology (from the Topology processor) and projected topology (from the Market), as well as handles Supply Chain queries.

The data for the Repository component is stored in a graph database called ArangoDB.

A Reserved Instance (RI) is a reservation of cloud resources and capacity purchased at a set price for a given time period. Unlike on-demand pricing, when you purchase a reservation, you commit to paying for all of the hours of the contract’s term. As a benefit, the hourly rate is lowered significantly. 

Turbonomic can help determine how many RI’s to purchase, if any. It can also optimize utilization of the RI inventory, assuring the best RI coverage and a good return on your RI investment.

Pricing is determined by the specific cloud provider. Cloud providers use their own factors to measure RI capacity so you can combine that capacity for different template families. See Normalized Factor Unit (nfu) and RI Ratio

Response Time is the measure of time between request and response on an Application Component entity, measured in ms. For Turbonomic analysis, you set the response time capacity in Application Component policies.

REST is an acronym for REpresentational State Transfer. It is an architectural style for distributed hypermedia systems, and was first presented by Roy Fielding in 2000.  

Turbonomic exposes its functions and capabilities via the Turbonomic REST API.

Return on Investment (ROI) is the calculation an entity makes in each Turbonomic market cycle to decide what action, if any, it wants to take.  ROI equals Revenue divided by Expenses.

For hosts, If ROI is less than 1, the host will remain the same or suspend (after all Virtual Machines move off it). If ROI equals more than 1, the host is considered to be profitable, and might decide to clone itself.

For Virtual Machines (VMs), if ROI equals less than 1, the VM is considered to be unprofitable, and might downsize. If it equals more than 1, the VM is considered to be profitable and might decide to upsize.

RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) is an open-source operating system that supports technologies for automation, cloud, containers, middleware, storage, application development, micro-services, virtualization, management, and more. Turbonomic can discover and  manage RHEL workloads, and you can deploy Turbonomic on RHEL platforms.

Turbonomic supports management of RHEL workloads in the real-time market and in plans, including Migrate To Cloud plans.

SaaS is a software distribution model in which a service provider hosts applications for customers and makes them available to these customers via the internet.

Turbonomic delivers a fully managed SaaS edition of its platform. This edition runs on Tier-1 data centers in the Cloud, with one instance per customer.

SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language) is an XML-based open standard for transferring identity data between two parties -- an IdP (Identity Provider) and a Service Provider (SP). SAML is often used to implement SSO because it allows users to sign in one time (to the IdP) and access multiple service providers. Turbonomic supports Single Sign-On (SSO) using any SAML 2.0-compliant SSO IdP (Identity Provider).

[Also known as Producer] A Seller is an entity in your environment that provides resources to another entity, such as a Host selling CPU resources to a Virtual Machine. 

 In the Turbonomic Supply Chain, a Service is a measurable function that is part of an internal or user-initiated request, such as a request to update inventory. A service can consume from Application Components, Containers and Container Pods, VMs, and Database Servers. Turbonomic can discover Services through APM or Kubernetes targets. 

Service performance is key to understanding application performance, but it only indirectly affects user experience.