IBM Turbonomic Glossary

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.

A Service Provider (SP) is an organization that provides a network, storage, or processing service. Different types of such providers include Internet Service Providers (ISP), Application Service Providers (ASP) Storage Service Providers (SSP) and content providers.

ServiceNow is a cloud-based company that provides software-as-a-service (SaaS) to manage technical workflows. Many Turbonomic enterprise customers use ServiceNow to manage incidents, service requests, and Change Requests (CRs).

Turbonomic integrates with ServiceNow to audit actions and create CRs for specific actions. Once an action is tracked in a CR, it can be approved, scheduled, and recorded in ServiceNow, and executed in Turbonomic on demand or on schedule.

See also Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) and Orchestration

Shared-Nothing Migration is a VM move to a host and to a storage all in one action.  This is necessary when the new host for the VM cannot access the storage that supports the VM. For example, assume a VM on a host also uses local storage on that host. 

Turbonomic can move that VM to a different host and move its data to a different datastore in a single action.

Single Sign-On (SSO) is an authentication process that allows a user to log in with a single ID and password to any of several related, yet independent, software systems. True single sign-on allows the user to log in once and access services without re-entering authentication factors. You can configure SSO for Turbonomic using any SAML 2.0-compliant SSO IdP (Identity Provider).

When SSO is enabled, Turbonomic only permits logins via the SSO IdP. Whenever you navigate to your Turbonomic installation, it redirects you to the SSO Identity Provider (IdP) for authentication before displaying the Turbonomic user interface. Before you enable SSO for your Turbonomic installation, you must configure at least one SSO user with Turbonomic Administrator privileges. If you do not, once you enable SSO, you will not be able to configure any SSO users in Turbonomic.

SLES (SUSE Linux Enterprise Server) is an open-source operating system developed by the SUSE organization. It is designed for workload management and optimization at the enterprise level on mainframes, servers, workstations and desktop computers. Turbonomic can discover and manage RHEL workloads, and the Turbonomic OVA is delivered as a SLES platform.

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

SLO (Service Level Objective) is a specific metric, such as maximum number of transactions per second or maximum acceptable response time, within a Service Level Agreement. Failure to meet the SLO could result in a penalty for the service provider, such as partial refund of fees or use of the service for additional time without additional charge.

IBM Turbonomic actively supports meeting Business Application SLOs. To evaluate the performance of your applications and Database Servers, set Response Time or Transaction SLOs as an operational constraint in policies. For applications, you can set the SLO at the Business Application, Business Transaction, Service, or Application Component level. In Kubernetes environments, SLOs defined in a Service policy override any SLOs set in the associated Application Component to prevent conflicts.

No Turbonomic actions would cause failure to meet SLO levels.

Snowflake is a SaaS product that provides data warehouse services. The Turbonomic Data Exporter can stream data to Snowflake, and customers can use Snowflake to visualize that data and gain insights into their virtual environments. 

SPECis a non-profit corporation formed to establish and maintain standardized benchmarks and tools to evaluate performance and energy efficiency for computing systems.  When creating Host templates in Turbonomic, you can choose from a catalog of CPU capacity. To build this catalog, Turbonomic uses benchmark data from spec.org.

SQL is a standard language for accessing and manipulating databases, e.g., to execute queries, retrieve data, insert or edit records, or create stored procedures. 

In the 6.4 version family, Turbonomic uses SQL to create new report templates. In later version families, Turbonomic offers Embedded Reports.

SSH is a software package that enables secure system administration and file transfers over insecure networks. In SSH, all user authentication, commands, output, and file transfers are encrypted to protect against attacks in the network. Tatu Ylonen developed the SSH protocol in 1995 in response to the hacking of the Finnish university network

To administer the Turbonomic platform at the OS or container level, you can use SSH sessions on the hosting VM. 

Supercluster is a term that refers to the results of a Merge placement policy. This Merge policy joins two or more clusters into a single group of providers. This enables Turbonomic to move workload from a host in one of the clusters to a host in any of the merged clusters.

By default, Turbonomic respects boundaries inherent in your environment, such as cluster boundaries or networks. A supercluster provides more choices for workload placement.

See also Cluster

In Turbonomic, the Supply Chain is the full stack of entities in your IT environment, placed in buyer/seller relationships with each other, where some entities provide resources while others consume the supplied resources.

Turbonomic uses Targets to discover the entities in your environment and stitch them together into a Supply Chain, and it displays the Supply Chain in an organizer that you can use to view the relationships or set session scope. With the Supply Chain, you can see at a glance how resource issues impact the full stack of your IT environment.

Swagger refers to the set of tools that you can use to implement APIs using the OpenAPI specification.  Turbonomic uses the SwaggerGUI as one way to deliver documentation for the Turbonomic API.